Disability studies has redefined our understanding of the relationships between bodily and mental particularities and their social and physical contexts. In the broad-survey scholarship, four distinct claims continue to be made: (1) that the late eighteenth century is a period of transition from disability being understood as a supernatural sign to disability being regarded as a scientific phenomenon (the prodigy-to-pathology thesis); (2) that multiple ideas of disability circulate and recirculate at the same time and across time (the recirculation thesis); (3) that the modern sense of ‘disability’ emerges during the early nineteenth century as a product of changes in government administration (the administration thesis); and (4) that the modern sense of ‘disability’ emerged out of a number of disciplinary practices, including the development of statistics as a way of measuring norms (the normalcy thesis). This book challenges these paradigms, arguing for the development of historically appropriate concepts of disability, and demonstrating the benefits of abandoning the anachronistic term ‘disability’.

The chapter examines the relationship of three knowledges: linguistic knowledge, conceptual knowledge and encyclopedic knowledge. It is argued that within the socio-cultural background knowledge we should distinguish between conceptual knowledge and encyclopedic knowledge. According to the model described in the chapter, meaning is constructed in the dynamic interplay of actual situational context and prior context encapsulated in lexical items. The context represents the actual, present, situational, ever-changing side of socio-cultural background and the lexical item(s) used in the interaction encapsulate previous experiences and relations in the socio-cultural background.