Contextual Assumptions Research Articles

Exploring the contextual assumptions, interventions and outcomes of digital advance care planning systems: A theory of change approach to understand implementation and evaluation

Exploring the contextual assumptions, interventions and outcomes of digital advance care planning systems: A theory of change approach to understand implementation and evaluation

Dynamism of context: A case of joke interpretation

Abstract While the recognition of context as a dynamic construct is pervasive, the process of selecting context during utterance comprehension in real time remains largely unexamined. This paper addresses this issue by exploring the dynamism of context as part of joke interpretation. We assume a relevance-theoretic definition of context understood as a set of mental representations involved in inferential processes that operate on a propositionally incomplete linguistic form and yield a speaker-intended meaning, consisting of the explicit and implicit import. We also adopt a model of joke comprehension combining the standard notion of incongruity resolution with that of weak communication, positing that when the punchline comes there is a broad array of assumptions that suddenly become manifest to the hearer, as a result of which he experiences an effect of inferential overload. This effect hinges on the ability to obtain access to, or to inferentially construct contextual assumptions that were previously not immediately accessible to the hearer or not represented in their cognitive resources at all. By analysing jokes of various structure (with or without a build-up, one-liners) we explore details of the dynamism of context selection and construction, in which the hearer’s encyclopaedic knowledge is essential. We provide arguments in favour of the view of context as an entity dependent on the hearer’s mental representations, inferential abilities and the universal drive to maximize relevance in utterance comprehension.

Person-centred data sharing: Empirical studies in private individuals’ attitudes

Background Recognising the power of data analytics, researchers are anxious to gain access to personal data either directly from data subjects or via research data sets. This requires a secure environment, such as a trusted research environment (TRE). However, it is unclear how the data subjects themselves regard sharing their data with TREs, especially if research goals are difficult to specify upfront or data are used for secondary purposes, making informed consent difficult to manage. We review three empirical studies to throw some light on individual attitudes to sharing health data. Methods Three anonymous, online surveys were run. The first involving 800 UK residents aimed at understanding how participants view the health data security. The second involving 500 UK residents aimed at identifying private individual views on privacy. These two surveys used a crowdsourcing platform. The third involved 1086 students at a UK university reporting their engagement with a trial diagnostic method for SARS-CoV-2. Results The first survey demonstrated that private individuals could make security decisions though they usually assume the recipient of their personal data to be responsible for all aspects of keeping the data safe. The second highlighted that individuals were aware of privacy risks but are motivated to share their data based on different contextual assumptions. The third, involving the incidental sharing of sensitive data during the SARS-CoV-2 pilot highlighted that prosocial motivations override potential personal benefit of such testing. Conclusions The three, unconnected surveys make clear that there are tensions between private individual understanding of data security and privacy risk, on the one hand, and how they behave, on the other. Respondents rely on data stewards to keep their data safe, though are likely to share even sensitive data for prosocial benefit. These findings have implications for those offering TRE services for research.

On the manifestness of assumptions

Abstract Right from the outset, relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995) tried to define interpretation as a process of context elaboration. Interpretation is seen as a path of least effort leading to the selection of a set of most accessible assumptions. One of the central aspects of this context elaboration process lies in the fact that contextual assumptions are not randomly scattered in the hearer’s cognitive environment. Instead, relevance theory claims that there are some organising principles ordering contextual assumptions and determining which will be accessed first and, therefore, which will be retained as part of the optimally relevant interpretation. The main organising principle is captured by the notion of manifestness, which combines two distinct properties of contextual assumptions: their accessibility and their strength in the cognitive environment. Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) define them as a function of the processing history of an assumption for the former and the confidence with which an assumption is held for the latter. In this paper, I will explore the explanatory potential of manifestness by putting the notions of strength and accessibility to work on two current trends in pragmatic research, namely commitment (Ifantidou 2001; Boulat and Maillat 2017, 2023; Mazzarella et al. 2018; Bonalumi et al. 2020) and emotion (Moeschler 2009; Dezecache et al. 2013, 2015; Wharton and Strey 2019; Wilson and Carston 2019; Saussure and Wharton 2020; Wharton et al. 2021). My goal will be to show how these two dimensions of manifestness, as they were developed in the very early days of RT, can provide us with new theoretical insights in the study of human communication. In this paper, I will argue that, beyond their usefulness in providing a guiding principle for the comprehension procedure, the strength and accessibility of contextual assumptions can also advantageously shed light on other phenomena like commitment and emotions.

Strength is relevant: experimental evidence of strength as a marker of commitment

When relevance theory tried to express the underlying processes involved during interpretation, Sperber and Wilson posited a process of context elaboration in which interpretation is seen as a path of least effort leading to the selection of a set of most salient contextual assumptions and implications. In this view, contextual assumptions are not randomly scattered in the hearer's cognitive environment during this context elaboration process. Instead, Relevance Theory claims that there are some organizing principles ordering contextual assumptions and determining which assumptions will be more likely to be accessed first in the process. The focus of this paper is on one such organizing principle captured by the notion of strength. Sperber and Wilson define it as the degree of confidence with which an assumption is held. While this notion has been posited right from the early days of Relevance theory, it has been left relatively untouched in relevance-theoretic accounts. In this paper, we will assess the explanatory potential of the notion of strength by linking it to the much-debated range of phenomena understood as related to commitment, i.e., the degree of speaker involvement in the truth of their utterance. Our goal will be to argue for a theoretical account of strength, in which strength is regarded as a cognitive marker of commitment, and more generally of the epistemic value of an utterance. In order to support this claim, we will present a series of original experimental designs in which we manipulated the level of speaker commitment in the information conveyed by their utterance. We predicted, on the basis of the theoretical model put forward, that such a manipulation would impact the level of strength. This cognitive effect, it is claimed, can in turn be measured through a recall task. We present results which support this model and discuss its implications.

Creating placeholders on the fly: A metarepresentational approach

In verbal and non-verbal discourse, a communicator is occasionally unable or unwilling to produce a certain expression for contextual reasons (e.g. memory lapse, politeness consideration). In such cases, she may employ a placeholder (PH), such as whatchamacallit, to fill in the slot of a target expression. Research on PHs has been growing, but previous studies have been almost exclusively concerned with conventional forms such as whatchamacallit and you-know-what, ‘conventional’ in that they are well known in a speech community and commonly used by the community members. In this paper, we reveal various ways in which a communicator creates an ad hoc PH form on the fly, drawing examples from two East Asian languages: Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. The ad hoc PH data are naturally handled from the perspective of relevance-theoretic pragmatics, especially its foundational concepts of optimal relevance and metarepresentation. More specifically, a communicator, when she encounters a word-formulation problem, may improvise a PH form by metarepresenting a target form with varying degrees of resemblance. From a hearer/reader's angle, the presumption of optimal relevance and a set of contextual assumptions guide him to identify the referent of an ad hoc PH and to derive a variety of contextual implications.

Probabilistic modeling of rational communication with conditionals

While a large body of work has scrutinized the meaning of conditional sentences, considerably less attention has been paid to formal models of their pragmatic use and interpretation. Here, we take a probabilistic approach to pragmatic reasoning about indicative conditionals which flexibly integrates gradient beliefs about richly structured world states. We model listeners' update of their prior beliefs about the causal structure of the world and the joint probabilities of the consequent and antecedent based on assumptions about the speaker's utterance production protocol. We show that, when supplied with natural contextual assumptions, our model uniformly explains a number of inferences attested in the literature, including epistemic inferences, conditional perfection and the dependency between antecedent and consequent of a conditional. We argue that this approach also helps explain three puzzles introduced by Douven (2012) about updating with conditionals: depending on the utterance context, the listener's belief in the antecedent may increase, decrease or remain unchanged.

Deliberating with the Autocrats? A Case Study on the Limitations and Potential of Political CSR in a Non-Democratic Context

Extant literature on Political CSR and the role of governments in the governance of business conduct tends to neglect key implications of the political-institutional macro-context for public deliberation. Contextual assumptions often remain rather implicit, leading to the need for a more nuanced, explicit and context-sensitive exploration of the theoretical and practical boundary conditions of Political CSR. In non-democratic political-institutional contexts, political pluralism and participation are limited, and governmental agencies continue to play the most central role in regulation and its enforcement. Drawing on a qualitative case study on a nuclear energy project in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, we show how both governments and MNCs co-create a context hostile to socially responsible business conduct in the sense of Political CSR. Utilizing rich qualitative data derived from interviews, public documents, and participant observation between 2008 and 2018, we specifically illuminate how—through which interactions and strategies—the multiple governmental and corporate actors involved counter civil society demands for public deliberation, indicating the limitations of Political CSR in non-democratic political-institutional contexts. We particularly contribute to the development of Political CSR by analysing the role of coercive and discursive forms of power. We thus offer a more nuanced perspective on the role of governments in constraining the room for public deliberation in the sense of Political CSR.

Additive concessive conditionals

This paper develops an account of additive concessive conditionals, ACCs, such as the German Wir gehen wandern,auch wennes regnet ‘We will go walking even (lit. also) if it rains’. Concessivity is here understood as an essentially modal notion: the actual world does not conform to contextual assumptions, expectations or priorities (Müller 2016). I adopt a modal analysis of conditionals which interprets them relative to an ordering source (Kratzer, 1986). With ACCs, the concessive interpretation arises from the contradiction between the asserted conditional “if p then q” and the conditional perfection (CP) “if p then not q” of the conditional presupposed by the additive “if not p then q” (Pasch, 1995). This contradiction triggers the inference that the actual world does not conform to the ordering constraints that restrict the CP of the additive presupposition. This account predicts that additive conditionals should not receive a concessive interpretation in contexts that do not support conditional perfection. This prediction is borne out.

Interactional and rhetorical functions of placeholders: A relevance-theoretic approach

A growing number of studies have been conducted on placeholders (PHs). A PH is a dummy item that a speaker uses to fill in the syntactic slot of a target form that she cannot immediately retrieve or prefers not to disclose for social reasons. Since PHs are usually employed in verbal interaction, previous studies have been almost exclusively concerned with their interactional functions. PHs, however, are also widely attested in a digitally-mediated written form of communication (e.g. blog posts, Internet articles). In the present article, I provide new data on demonstrative-derived PHs in Japanese and reveal their rhetorical (i.e. non-interactional) functions. Further, I develop a uniform account of PHs in relevance theory. In the literature, no substantive analysis has been provided for the semantics and pragmatics of PHs. I propose that the PHs encode procedural meaning, and show that a wide range of PH functions emerge as outcomes of relevance-driven pragmatic inference based on the encoded meaning of PHs and contextual assumptions. In this analysis, the interactional and rhetorical functions of PHs are uniformly captured in terms of the presumption of optimal relevance.

On linguistic communication based on resemblance in form

In relevance theory, it has been claimed that the sentence uttered underdetermines the proposition explicitly communicated by the speaker. In this paper, I present another case in which what is explicitly communicated is distinct from what is said. Sometimes an expression is used to evoke another expression which it resembles in form. For example, in Korean, aphmyen ‘front side’ may be used to evoke anmyen ‘face’ in anmyen molswu ‘pretending not to recognize somebody.’ I analyze this phenomenon as involving the use of one expression to loosely metarepresent another which it resembles in form. Assuming that the speaker may be unable or unwilling to convey her meaning more directly, the addressee recognizes the resemblance and infers the intended meaning from the expression used, together with contextual assumptions. The extra effort required will be compensated by extra cognitive effects. I argue that the loosely metarepresented expression contributes to the explicature of the utterance, and that the expression used in the utterance may contribute to (the derivation of) an implicature. This is another interesting case in which the explicature of the utterance is distinct from what is said, and where linguistic communication can be achieved by exploiting resemblance in form.

Unifying instrumental variable and inverse probability weighting approaches for inference of causal treatment effect and unmeasured confounding in observational studies.

Confounding is a major concern when using data from observational studies to infer the causal effect of a treatment. Instrumental variables, when available, have been used to construct bound estimates on population average treatment effects when outcomes are binary and unmeasured confounding exists. With continuous outcomes, meaningful bounds are more challenging to obtain because the domain of the outcome is unrestricted. In this paper, we propose to unify the instrumental variable and inverse probability weighting methods, together with suitable assumptions in the context of an observational study, to construct meaningful bounds on causal treatment effects. The contextual assumptions are imposed in terms of the potential outcomes that are partially identified by data. The inverse probability weighting component incorporates a sensitivity parameter to encode the effect of unmeasured confounding. The instrumental variable and inverse probability weighting methods are unified using the principal stratification. By solving the resulting system of estimating equations, we are able to quantify both the causal treatment effect and the sensitivity parameter (i.e. the degree of the unmeasured confounding). We demonstrate our method by analyzing data from the HIV Epidemiology Research Study.

Interpreting the Arguments of China and the Philippines in the South China Sea Territorial Dispute: A Relevance-Theoretic Perspective

The South China Sea territorial dispute has been a contentious issue in the international community. In the course of 3 years, China and the Philippines had undergone arbitral proceedings over the maritime rights and entitlements in the South China Sea. As the Permanent Court of Arbitration reached its decision, this paper aims to examine the interpretation process of the Arbitral Tribunal in the judgment of the South China Sea conflict between China and the Philippines. The primary objective of the study is to reconstruct or explain how the Tribunal came up with its interpretation of the written arguments presented by the parties involved and to distinguish whether such reconstruction the Tribunal has successfully interpreted or made sense of the said arguments and submissions. Doing so would necessitate a pragmatic analysis– the relevance-theoretic account of human communication and cognition. Data analyzed include written submissions and arguments as well as the legal documents used during the arbitral process. Using content analysis, the data were evaluated through applying the tool of interpretation based on the criteria set by the three conditions of the relevance theory: (1) logical condition, (2) pragmatic condition, and (3) condition of optimal relevance. This paper argues that in order for the addressee of an utterance, in this case the Arbitral Tribunal, to attain a successful interpretation, it should meet these three conditions. This study found that the reconstruction of the interpretation based on the three conditions showed that the Tribunal had attained a valid and correct interpretation of the Philippines’ and China’s arguments. Furthermore, the paper asserts that implied conclusion and the contextual assumptions can be a guiding principle for the cognitive comprehension or interpretation of legal texts.

The African Context, Cultural Competence and Emic Aspects of Qualitative Research

ABSTRACT The context of African and Eastern emerging markets often requires research methods to be adapted for culture and less sophisticated levels of human development. Recently there have been calls from scholars to increase African contributions to knowledge creation by being open to an interpretivist approach. This conceptual paper responds to the appeals by describing ways in which researchers may supplement existing knowledge by repositioning their worldviews from an outsider (etic perspective) perspective to that of an insider (emic perspective), taking on a range of culturally-relevant skills and attitudes. Being explicit about the contextual assumptions and boundary conditions of a study facilitates a shift from acontextual generalizable research to rich and detailed explications grounded purely in the gathered data; such an approach enables the emergence of new theories which may later be tested empirically.

COVID-19 and Autism Research: Perspectives from Around the Globe.

COVID-19 and Autism Research: Perspectives from Around the Globe.

Microbial Risk Assessment of Escherichia coli O157:H7 in Beef Imported from the United States of America to Taiwan.

Outbreaks of foodborne illness caused by pathogenic Escherichia coli (E. coli) O157:H7, which are attributable to the consumption of undercooked beef, have occurred in many countries. In Taiwan, the production of domestic beef accounts for only 5% of the total amount of beef sold. Therefore, we applied different contextual assumptions to develop a quantitative microbial risk assessment of E. coli O157:H7 and evaluated the risk of illness in the Taiwanese population consuming beef imported from the United States of America. The probability distribution showed that, in males aged 19–65 years in the Taiwanese population, for example, when rare beef was consumed 100 servings, there was a 90% probability of randomly intaking seven colony forming units of E. coli O157:H7. When medium beef was consumed 10,000 servings, there was a 90% probability of randomly intaking two colony forming units of E. coli O157:H7. When the exceedance risk was 5%, the rate of foodborne illnesses caused by consuming rare beef contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 was 10–28 cases per 1 million individuals. For medium beef, this rate was 6–13 per 100 million individuals. Sensitivity analyses indicated that the amount of E. coli O157:H7 remaining in beef products after cooking was the most important risk factor, followed by the amount of beef products consumed. Proper cooking of imported beef consumed by the Taiwanese public reduces the incidence of foodborne disease to almost zero, without risk of harm to health.

Creating realities across languages and modalities: Multimodal recontextualization in the translation of online news reports

This paper conceptualizes the recent translation practices in online news sites as cross-lingual and multimodal recontextualization, examining their roles in creating coherent narratives with manipulative potentials. Drawing on the sociocognitive approach to context (van Dijk, 2008) and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (Ledin and Machin, 2018a), the paper analyzes a corpus of 30 Arabic and English translated news reports covering ISIS news. Four strategies of multimodal recontextualization were identified; each results in different types of meaning transformation. The analysis shows that recontextualization serves different communicative functions, ranging from epistemic fine-tuning, whose aim is to provide background information necessary for inference-making; cultural adaptability, which optimizes cultural resonance for the targeted readership and enhances text authenticity; and finally normalization of ideological stances across the source and the target texts. The findings suggest that multimodal recontextualization gives rise to different contextual assumptions across source and target texts, embedding each in a different ideological narrative. Conceptualizing these texts as “meaningful wholes” with different semiotic affordances (Ledin and Machin, 2018b) elucidates how recontextualization creates manipulative narratives across languages and modalities. These narratives are created through ideological appropriation made coherent by maintaining referential, spatiotemporal and action continuity along different semiotic levels.

Pragmatic reproduction of cultural-linguistic referents in translation from Spanish to Chinese

This paper examines the pragmatic translation of cultural-linguistic items through a relevance-theoretic study. The results suggest: 1) implicative value of the cultural-linguistic items is context-dependent and 2) loss of the linguistic form might imply the loss of the implicit clue. The study aims to expose the pragmatic values conveyed by the cultural-linguistic elements of Spanish and its Chinese translation. Furthermore, it explores how much original Spanish linguistic elements are accessible to the target readers of the Chinese translation. Based on a Spanish novel, namely La Colmena, and its Chinese translation Feng Fang, linguistic cultural referents from the Spanish original and their translations were compared, considering their cognitive contexts. This research points to the fact that the cognitive-environmental values of cultural-linguistic elements are generally underestimated, especially in Spanish-to-Chinese translation and, a large number of Spanish linguistic items do not maintain their implicatures in the Chinese translation due to different contextual assumptions.

Implicaturas generalizadas en español: un abordaje experimental

Las implicaturas conversacionales generalizadas (ICG) son un tipo de inferencia pragmática que se caracteriza por una derivación que sigue ciertas regularidades y que es relativamente independiente del contexto de situación (Grice, 1989). Existen dos modelos de procesamiento sobre este fenómeno desde una perspectiva cognitiva (Noveck & Reboul, 2008): 1) el modelo del procesamiento por default (Levinson, 2000) sostiene que el significado pragmático de las ICG se procesa automáticamente y que el contexto interviene tardíamente; 2) el modelo de procesamiento guiado por el contexto (Sperber & Wilson, 1995) considera que la información contextual interviene tempranamente para iniciar el proceso de derivación. Diversos estudios experimentales han cuestionado las hipótesis de estos modelos (Bezuidenhout & Cutting, 2002; Breheny, Katsos & Williams, 2006), sin embargo, a pesar de utilizar las mismas metodologías arribaron a resultados contrapuestos. En este trabajo reportamos los resultados de un experimento de juicios de aceptabilidad realizado con la implicatura escalar producida por el cuantificador algunos (Horn, 1984). Los resultados sugieren que el contexto que precede a la implicatura influye en su procesamiento tardíamente, en línea con las predicciones del modelo por default.

A new matrix for building platform portfolios: how companies can sustain their leadership

PurposeAn essential corporate decision-making tool, the Boston Consulting Group's growth-share matrix, is due for an upgrade. The purpose of this paper is to upgrade this growth matrix for use by corporate managers in the current platform age. Designed in the conglomerate age of the 1960s and 1970s to help corporate managers make disciplined and systematic portfolio investment decisions, the matrix is ill-adapted to the platform age in which we now live. The most valuable companies in the world are now platform companies, and many companies are transitioning to a more platform-based corporate portfolio. In this paper, the author explains how corporate managers can build and execute a sustainable platform portfolio.Design/methodology/approachThe author started with a thorough study of the contextual assumptions and theoretical background of the original Boston Consulting Group growth-share matrix (which the author has been teaching for the past decade). He contrasted these with the assumptions and theoretical background developed in the platform strategy literature. To test and refine the framework, the author presented and discussed its applicability at companies such as GSK and with local consultants. He then used five consecutive cohorts of master students [280 students (70 groups)] to test this framework on a total of 20 companies (both “born platform” and “product to platform” companies).FindingsThe platform ecosystem age requires a corporate decision-making matrix that discriminates between businesses on the basis of platform market growth and platform commercialization capability, rather than product market growth and market share. As in the original matrix, these businesses correspond to three different investment horizons (Figure 1): the continuous renewal of blockbuster business, the integration of emerging killer businesses and the experimentation with joint innovation businesses. This paper helps corporate managers build and execute a sustainable platform portfolio by means of a sequence of six decision-making steps and a clear organizational template for successful execution.Originality/valueThe portfolio matrix, decision-making sequence and organizational execution advice presented in this paper are fit for both “born platform” companies such as Google (Alphabet) and “product to platform” hybrids such as Lego. The paper illustrates this with practical examples for both types of companies.