Alex Davies (University of Tartu), "Metacontexts and Cross-Contextual Communication: Stabilizing the Content of Documents Across Contexts"

The Philosophical Quarterly, 2023

By Alex Davies

The older I get, the more I find myself doing university administration: I schedule, chair and participate in meetings where documents that define and regulate university life are written and applied. In these places I have the grey privilege of witnessing what truth there is in Michael Lipsky’s words: ‘To the mix of places where policies are made, one must add the crowded offices and daily encounters of street-level workers.’ Take, for instance, the document that describes what progress PhD students must make each year in their studies. This document states that PhD students who are writing article-based dissertations have to produce a publishable paper by the end of their first year. If they fail in this task, then they are booted out of the university. Sounds harsh (perhaps). But only until you stop to think about what “publishable paper” might mean. Publishable where? And what do the odds have to be that the paper is accepted at a given venue for it to be publish-able at that venue? Neither question is answered by the standing meaning of the words “publishable paper.” And our university’s other regulations don’t add much by way of further constraint. As far as the standing meaning of the university regulations is concerned, what’s sufficient for PhD students to meet this requirement by the end of their first year is left wide open to interpretation.

This is but one example. It is not unusual for an administrative document which was intended to communicate information across a range of different contexts to contain expressions whose standing meaning (the kind of thing you learn to associate with the expression when you learn it for the first time) significantly underdetermines the content it contributes to what the document says. Administrative documents are full of dispositionals, modal verbs, generics, quantifiers, abstract nouns, gradable adjectives, and other expressions whose standing-meanings (even when placed in the context of a larger text) underdetermine the content they need to express in order to bring about the coordination the documents are meant to induce. Thus, the truth there is in Lipsky’s above-quoted words: ‘To the mix of places where policies are made, one must add the crowded offices and daily encounters of street-level workers.’ Such documents leave such workers a great deal of latitude when interpreting the documents guiding their working lives.

This latitude can easily pull us toward the conclusion that such documents do not after-all share content across diverse contexts: different users of the document must be ascribing the document different contents. It’s easy to fall into this conclusion by abstracting from the problem situation all but the ingredients needed to state the problem. Two people want to use a linguistic expression to share content. That’s their sole aim. But with respect to this aim, it makes no difference which of several contents is ascribed to the expression—just so long as it’s the same content that each ascribes to the expression. The only thing to do is to agree by convention to ascribe one content over all the others to this expression. However, if convention (in the form of standing meaning) doesn’t do this, then it’s hard to believe these two people will end up ascribing the same content to this expression.

But perhaps by beginning with this rapid abstraction, we are tearing down the proverbial walls in order to get a better look at what’s holding up the proverbial roof (to steal a line from one of my heroes, Harold Garfinkel). Why deal in persons so single-minded as those who want but one thing: namely, to share content? If we dealt in persons who have other goals besides this, perhaps it would be possible to give them reasons to prefer one content over another, where standing meaning doesn’t? Perhaps content-sharing is a kind of thing in life achieved not by reaching directly for it, but indirectly through other pursuits (like happiness, or truth).

Return to the expression “publishable paper.” The expression isn’t used by people who aim only to share content with it. It is used by people who have other agendas. And given their roles within the university: systematically so. These other agendas can be used to draw them towards the same contents. To see this, let’s distinguish two roles (PhD students and progress review committee members) and two universities (High Standards University and Low Standards University). And let’s see how occupants of each role can be incentivized to align in content by the different structures of each university.

In High Standards University, the selection procedure for PhD students onto the programme filters out those students who don’t understand the importance of publication venue for their career prospects in professional philosophy. It also filters out those who have no strong ambition to find long-term employment in professional philosophy. So the students themselves have good reason to ascribe a content to “publishable paper” which is demanding: it’ll be restricted to relatively prestigious journals and to papers which stand a reasonable chance of getting accepted in those journals. Furthermore, the department that the progress review committee members belong to is assessed for performance by performance metrics. These metrics do not include dropout rates, but do include academic placement rates: where the placement rate is calculated by looking only at those PhD students who are still in the programme after the first year progress review. As a result, members of the progress review committee are not scared of sacrificing poor performing PhD students in order to improve placement rate performance. As a result in turn, they too ascribe a demanding content to “publishable paper”: if it really doesn’t look realistic that a student will be able to publish in venues that will give them a decent chance on the academic job market, then they are cut loose by the end of their first year. That this is the case constitutes a further incentive (of deference) on PhD students themselves to ascribe a demanding content to “publishable paper”: to hold themselves to a high standard in this regard. At High Standards University, both students and progress review committee members are likely to ascribe a demanding content to “publishable paper.”

In Low Standards University, things are different. Students are not accepted onto the programme in a way that selects only the knowledgeable and ambitious. Most accepted students are ignorant of how publication venue affects their chances of subsequent employment. And most of them are on the programme, not because of a burning ambition to become professional philosophers, but because they didn’t know what to do next in their lives. The students, then, don’t care where they publish, just so long as they manage to avoid getting kicked out. Moreover, in Low Standards University, a different performance metric system reigns. Placement rate isn’t measured. But drop-out rate is—inclusive of dropouts in the first year of the PhD programme. So the philosophy department will suffer if it cuts loose PhD students who, it seems, are not likely to produce work publishable in prestigious venues. It will in fact look better to the university if it holds onto those students and gets them to publish in low quality venues. So the progress review committee members are incentivized to keep the standards associated with “publishable paper” low in order to avoid increasing their dropout rate. This in turn strengthens students’ preference for a low-standard content also: insofar as they are aware that the committee will lean towards permitting low quality work. In Low Standards University, both students and staff are incentivized to ascribe “publishable paper” a permissive, low-standards content.

Here we see how, even when standing meaning permits diverse interpretations, the structure of a university can channel incentives on language users that direct them systematically toward one content rather than another. These incentives do not stem from a desire to share content (at least not as such). Their origins lie elsewhere – the proverbial walls we tear down when we concentrate blinkeredly upon language users whose sole aim is to share content. These incentives derive from what difference the content ascribed to “publishable paper” makes to what the expression’s users are doing and will bring about in and by their use of the expression. By shaping the character of the actions students and committee members pursue in and by using the expression, university structure helps to stabilize the contents the expressions’ users—despite operating in the different contexts that they do—are likely to ascribe to the same expression.

In a word, what matters for cross-contextual alignment of the content ascribed to an administrative document is not just the document itself, but in addition what we might call the document’s ‘metacontext’: the context of the group of contexts across which you aim to align interpretation. It’s the importance of this unit of analysis that I’m gesturing toward here, and that I defend in more detail in my paper ‘Metacontexts and Cross-Contextual Communication: Stabilizing the Content of Documents Across Contexts’. Here I’ve focused on “publishable paper”. There I focus on “sexual harassment”. Here I’ve gestured at what incentives might facilitate content-sharing. There I distinguish between 5 kinds of incentive on content ascription, besides the goal of sharing content, but which if suitably channelled, can be used to facilitate content sharing.