Towards a Context- and Scope-Sensitive Analysis for Specifying Agent Behaviour - Advances in Social Simulation - page 320

• “ comfort ” - conditions are comfortable with no immediate survival threat, one

could stop worrying so much and take things a little easy

• “ entrepreneur ” - one is looking for big profit, taking risks if necessary

Clearly, most of the quotes in [3] come from a “survival” perspective, with the other
contexts being briefly imagined, or used as a contrast to “survival”.
The above quote is firmly from the survival context - in other contexts people
moving from rice to wheat would have been interpreted as an opportunity implying
higher prices, but here it is interpreted just as a trap, citing the East European
example. The quote acknowledges implicitly that prices could increase due to this
change in consumption in the East, but then anticipates that this might be followed by
a collapse (and thus pose a risk if resources were committed on the basis of rising
prices). The survival context implies several facts about what possibilities for action
there might be, namely: (a) one is not going to be able to discover a “killer” profit, (b)
to survive one has to focus on margins, looking for small improvements that will
allow one to break even. Once the context and scope has been stripped away this
quote seems to boil down to two observations (1) prices for wheat might increase (2)
increases in price can be followed by a sudden collapse.

Table 2. CSNE Analysis of Quote 1

Context Scope Narrative Elements

Survial No “killer”

profit
available

• Prices for wheat may increase in near future

• Price increases can be followed by a sudden

collapse

The second quote imagines the situation under possible climate change.
(Quote 2) “I, as a farmer would imagine that if the summers were warmer and
the autumns were wetter you would have an earlier harvest, and therefore all that
would happen is that the harvest would come early and your drilling [cultivation
of ground for sowing seeds] would come early so that you would still be able to
establish your winter crops before the rain really started. If the rains were really
early then we would have to resort to spring sown varieties... The net effect would
be that you would be drilling as soon as you possibly could which may be later
than normal, but because the weather is warmer that would make up for lost
time, so harvest would still be about the same time I would suspect.... If the
autumn was continuously wet, wet, wet and we were under water, I mean that is a
serious change - that is like this year, every year. If it was like this year every
year, then yes there could be a problem.” ( [3] p.112)
The last sentence implies the survival context again, the possible changes in weather
do not indicate any positive possibilities. It documents in detail some of the complex
reasoning about scope. The scope is considered that under the conditions that “ if the
summers were warmer and the autumns were wetter ” with refinements of this,
adding: “ If the rains were really early ” and then “ If the autumn was continuously wet,
wet, wet and we were under water ”. Each of these implies different narrative
elements.