Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
situation and thus bring to bear the same co-learnt norms, habits and other knowledge
in the same kinds of situation. This is the importance of social context and why it can
become so entrenched. The more recognisable a situation is as a kind of social
context, the more special kinds of protocol, norms, terms, habits and infrastructure is
developed for that context; the more a context is marked by differences of these kinds
the more it is recognisable. Examples of such entrenched social contexts include: the
lecture, a birthday party or an interview. We can all readily recognise such situations
and can access a rich array of relevant expectations, knowledge and habits without
apparent effort. Thus our cognition has a way of recognising the kind of exterior
situation, in other words we have some kind of internal correlate of the relevant kind
of situation, which I will call the cognitive context. It is this cognitive context that is
most relevant to the process in this paper.
The very facility with which we recognise different social contexts, learn new
knowledge with respect to them, and can bring to mind the relevant knowledge for
them causes difficult for us when trying to identify the cognitive contexts with respect
to which people act. This is due to the richness of the information that seems to be
used in such recognition, and also the fact that its recognition is done largely
unconsciously. It is this that makes context such a difficult thing to handle. However
social context, due to the fact that it is often entrenched in our common practices and
institutions, is easier to identify, and it is social contexts that are of the greatest
interest here. Also although we are frequently unconscious of which context we are
assuming, we are very sensitive to violations of context, or when the wrong context
has been assumed.
3
Scope
Scope is the label I have given to the consideration of what is and is not possible
within any particular situation. Thus when entering the context of a lecture one may
assess where it is possible to sit - it may be very crowded and it might not be possible
to slip in at the back and one might have to sit on the steps rather than a seat. Thus
scope is something one assesses within a context, since its assessment will often
depend upon context-dependent information (such as what is socially acceptable in a
lecture context, which may rule out vaulting over the seats).
Working out what is and is not possible in any situation is computationally
onerous. This is why the “frame problem” of AI [12] is so hard. This is the reason
that humans only do such calculations rarely, for the most part assuming past
assessments of scope to frame decision making rather than checking these frequently.
Indeed, it seems likely that there are a number of heuristics at play to make
assessments of scope feasible, including: not working it out explicitly but relying on a
learning process of trial and error, or only attending to scope when meeting new kinds
of situation or when something has gone wrong in an unexpected manner. If Luhman
[11] is right, a major function of social institutions is to simplify calculations like
these for its participants, and it is very plausible that social contexts evolve so that
they ensure that scope is more stable inside a context, so that people can learn it and
