A Pragmatic Approach to Context and Meaning

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A Pragmatic Approach to Context and Meaning
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Pragmatism

• Fosters highly inter-disciplinary work
• Discourages theory in isolation from application
• Encourages many co-existent theories

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Vygotskys Genetic Theory

• Phylo-genesis the biological evolution of the
  species.
• Socio-cultural the evolution of the society
  across history.
• Onto-genesis the psychological development of
  the individual.
• Micro-genesis the short-term learning or
  production of a novel behavior.

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Leont'ev's Activity Theory

• Activities are generally long-lived behaviors by
  people, directed by some motive or object.
• Objects are the set of things which are typically
  changed by the activity, and knowledge of whose
  state is important for the conduct of the
  activity.
• Actions are goal-directed behaviors.
• almost always cause changes in the world
• generally much more short-lived than activities
• are often hierarchical, and there is a wide range
  of levels of abstraction

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Activity Theory

• Operations are atomic components of actions.
• Usually short
• Don't require conscious reflection
• A role is a pattern of relations between a
  subject and the other entities.
• A genre is a pattern of relationships between a
  tool or action and other entities in the context
  of an activity.
• A distinction between activities, which satisfy a
  need, and the actions that constitute the
  activities.

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Why Activity Theory?

• Longitudinal rather than episodic focus
• Broad application over the years in many realms
• It's a multi-level theory incorporating activity,
  actions, operations
• Complementary relation to role and genre

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Goffman's Frame Analysis

• Actions in social contexts are communicative
  acts.
• The frame is a schema of beliefs and rules
  which allow an observer to make sense of a
  particular situation.
• essential, defining elements of a particular
  culture
• rely heavily on (anonymous) channels of cultural
  propagation

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Frame Analysis

• the diffusion channels of popular culture
• language as action principle
• The defined activity structure requires only
  low-order statistical properties of a dataset,
  and has few parameters.

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Situation Analysis

• Common Ground is the information shared by two
  or more parties to a dialog that allows them to
  achieve some common purpose through the dialog.
• Grounding is how individuals establish further
  common ground in the course of a purposeful
  discourse, or joint project.

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Meaning and Intention

• The meaning of an action in a context is the
  anticipated consequences of that action.
• Context means the activity(ies) of which the
  action is part, the frame(s) which apply in this
  situation, and the further common ground (if any)
  that the subject and observer of the action have
  built up.
• A computer, assuming it is able to observe the
  eventual outcomes of the action in question, can
  hope to learn the typical consequences of the
  action in context.

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Modeling Actions

• Temporal structure
• Hierarchical planners using predicate logic,
  probabilistic logic, Hidden Markov Models,
  Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes,
  etc.
• Schank's script model
• Generalized phrase (smoothed n-gram) models

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Automation

• Should also be useful as a guide to designers in
  a variety of situations where designer
  intelligence substitutes for part of the
  automation
• Requires very detailed elaboration of the theory,
  and is much more likely to expose flaws or
  weaknesses, or differences between assumptions
  about the world by the theorys developers, and
  reality.
• A social scientific instrument with which one can
  observe context in real situations and further
  contribute to theoretical development.