What is context in notes?

Context in notes is a concept in personal epistemology: An atomic note should carry enough context to be understood without its original source.

Example: You highlight a sentence from a book: 'The map is not the territory.' Six months later you find it in your notes. Which map? Which territory? Was Korzybski talking about semantics, was it Bateson on epistemology, or was it your team lead quoting it in a meeting about architecture diagrams? The sentence is identical in all three cases. Without context, it's a fortune cookie. With context — source, date, why it mattered to you, what you were thinking when you captured it — it's a usable building block.

This concept is part of Phase 2 (Atomicity and Decomposition) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for atomicity and decomposition.