Project

Project: "The Role of Metacontexts in Stabilizing Text Content : a case study of Estonia’s Road Conditions Requirements Ordinance"

Duration: January 2024-December 2025 

Here's a predicament I sometimes find myself in at work--perhaps you have found yourself in similar circumstances. I have to decide what to do by consulting a document--one that regulates what we can and should do, and how, within our organization. Sometimes I am absolutely convinced that the document says one thing but a colleague of mine who works elsewhere in the organization is absolutely convinced that it says something else. In short: the document has been written with words that are open to interpretation, even though the document was supposed to share a single message through the organization. So why was it written in words that are open to interpretation? 

However, it turns out that such words are hard to avoid. Linguists and philosophers of language have collected much evidence that even words which, at first glance, you would think are not open to interpretation, in fact are. I'd go as far as to say that it's largely inevitable that such words will turn up in such documents. The answer is (only) to rewrite the documents.

If you want a document to share a single message across many contexts (say many job roles within the same organization), then you need to pay attention to more than just the document. You need to take a look at the things that shape how the documents' users are likely to interpret the document, and, how the structure of the organization itself distributes these things within the organization--what we might call the "metacontext" of all of the contexts where the document is read and used.

This is precisely what the MetaContexts Project is all about. The Metacontext project is an investigation into how metacontext design shapes the fortunes of a document that is meant to be understood the same way across many different contexts for interpreting it. The project takes as a case-study an Estonian road ordinance that describes the conditions under which the roads should be cleared of snow and ice--an ordinance which contains words that are open to interpretation and which different organizations that use the ordinance have interpreted differently (principally the Estonian Transport Administration, the firms that the administration subcontracts to clear the roads, and road-using firms). We aim to better understand the role of metacontext design in a document's capacity to share a message across contexts by studying this particular metacontext in detail.

Theory behind the Project

• Davies (2023), "Metacontexts and Cross-Contextual Communication: Stabilizing the Content of Documents Across Contexts" (The Philosophical Quarterly)

• General Audience Summary (in English)

• General Audience Summary (in Estonian)