Chapter 1 introduces relevance theory as a cognitive theory of communication. Its key concepts and terms are explained using short conversational examples. The theory deals with ostensive inferential communication. In this view, understanding the things people say involves decoding linguistic material from their utterances and making inferences using that material in a context. Context is constructed as part of the comprehension process, using a range of sources including the immediate environment, short-term memory, for example of what has been said and done, and encyclopaedic information associated with concepts held in long-term memory. Additionally the construction of context involves the accesssing of new assumptions, such as implicated premises, which allow the hearer to arrive at a relevant outcome. The process is driven by the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance. The cognitive principle of relevance directs us generally towards relevant information, and the communicative principle of relevance directs us towards understanding ostensive stimuli such as utterances. Relevance is not a static property; it is always contextual. Inferencing is involved in reference assignment, disambiguation and enrichment, and in the derivation of higher-level explicatures and implicatures. The chapter serves as preparation for moving to the consideration of literary communication in later chapters.

Change isn’t always orderly. Sometimes, it’s messy, emergent, and unpredictable. Chapter 3 introduces an organic perspective – one that sees change as a constant process unfolding through interaction, context, and chance. Instead of controlling change, this approach focuses on sensing, responding, and evolving. Drawing on ideas like complexity theory and informal networks, it reveals a more fluid way of understanding transformation. While it resists neat solutions, this perspective expands how we think about change - and challenges us to embrace uncertainty as part of the process.

This chapter will apply everything you’ve learnt about statutory interpretation by guiding you through how to interpret statutes, step by step. This chapter has two worked examples and one exercise. The first worked example is an example of a hypothetical scenario your lecturers may put to you to see how well you command the tools of statutory interpretation without requiring any additional research. The relevant facts and materials are given to you. This worked example is also a great example of a mini-moot interpretation question, as you have two parties who each have their own positions on how the law should be interpreted. The second worked example models the same process, this time using real legislation from a point in time. The exercise provides another opportunity to put your interpretation and legal research skills to the test. It too uses real legislation from a point in time but this time illustrates the interpretation process using a guiding metaphor.

The Introduction positions the book’s argument – literary representations of climate control promote a hitherto neglected awareness of anthropogenic climate change – within the fields of nineteenth-century studies and the environmental humanities. It argues that the space-time compression of the fin de siècle afforded not only social and geopolitical but also environmental volatility. The chapter posits that the catastrophic climate event of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption and the spread of domestic climate technologies such as the greenhouse (early nineteenth century), the radiator (mid nineteenth century), and air-conditioning (late nineteenth century) provoked symbolic connections between an ever-accruing control of the local climate and an ever-increasing chaos of the global climate. A range of literary authors expressed a desire for global control by pursuing different narrative modes – speculative, utopian, and modern – to represent the deliberate intervention into the global climate of the deep future, ensuing utopia, or the literary exegesis itself.

Representing the macro-level and historical context associated with the social ecologies of physically diverse individuals, our chapter is strategic. It uses theory to analyze and interrogate the underacknowledged dialectic produced both to the human sources of discrimination as well as those who are victims or prey to its impact. The latter is evident either as patterned interpersonal traditions among individuals or as lifecourse, impactful, organized stress-imposing systems. Using the theoretical framework of phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST), our chapter interrogates the historical underpinnings and persistence of ethnic and racial discrimination and discusses implications for potential supportive remedies. This dual conceptual concentration (i.e., phenomenology and ecology) acknowledges perception and context while taking into account cognitive, socioemotional, and biological human processes. Central to this analysis are the enduring intergenerational manifestations, as underanalyzed multisystems, that contribute to the persistence of ethnic and racial discrimination.

Chapter 13 explores the concept of mathematical identity and how both students and teachers come to see themselves in relation to mathematics. It examines the impact of maths anxiety – particularly in the early years of teaching – and how identity is influenced by community, context, and experience. The chapter highlights the importance of understanding and responding to diverse school settings, including rural, regional, and remote communities. You will also consider how to meaningfully embed the Australian Curriculum cross-curriculum priorities – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and sustainability – within mathematics lessons.

The introduction seeks to provide bold outlines of Ngugi’s complex contexts and point to how these offer new paths to his fiction. While acknowledging that scant attention has been paid to the context in which Ngugi’s works are produced, we are also seeking to understand how this context has been mediated by Ngugi’s discourse. To do this is to suggest that Ngugi as a writer of praxis also generates his context and enters into dialogue with familial and historical events, intellectual climate and other layers of institutional practices that have helped him disrupt received knowledges and histories. The contexts, far from offering some objective and reified source of knowledge, are an engagement with a society and historical moment in flux and in need of reinterpretation. One aim of this introduction is to displace our notion of context as a reified site of retrieval; another is to see how context offers readers a handle on new and disruptive ways of rereading Ngugi’s texts. I argue that contexts, whether one is thinking of family, mission education or Mau Mau emergency and related colonial experiences, are not muted sites of knowledge, nor are they self-evident sources of meaning and meaning-making, but a seething site of creativity and meaning-making.

In this chapter, I will explore connections that have brought Ngugi and Gakaara together, especially in the use of Gĩkũyũ language in their writings. By talking about these two authors, the chapter acknowledges that their works contribute to the rich tapestry of Gĩkũyũ cultural expression and identity. Gakaara wa Wanjau has had a significant influence on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s writings, particularly in terms of shaping Ngugi’s perspectives on Gĩkũyũ language, culture and identity. Gakaara Wanjau was Ngugi’s predecessor in using the Gĩkũyũ language in his writings in both colonial and postcolonial Kenya and a publisher known for his advocacy of writing in African languages and promoting indigenous cultures. Having established these connections, the chapter then seeks to examine how Ngugi’s aesthetic ideology has evolved under a deliberate return to Gĩkũyũ orature and language, especially in his epic novel Mũrogi wa Kagogo. How has this newly found context shaped Ngugi’s ever changing poetics? Has Ngugi’s attempt to return to Agĩkũyũ oral traditions and language helped him to transcend imprisonment within the European realist genre? What does it mean to write in a mother tongue while living in exile?

Maurice Joosten played a transformative role in my developing attitude to cancer, partly through yoga and mindfulness practice.

This chapter addresses the crucial interpretative issue of the relationship between performance and text in Pindar’s odes. What elements do we have to reconstruct the circumstances of their first performances? How important are these elements for the interpretation of the poems? In what manner was the wording of the texts themselves meant to reflect and interact with the extra-textual elements pertaining to the performance?The first parts of the chapter focus on the less studied fragments of Pindar’s cultic poetry, offering both a survey of the evidence and some novel interpretative contributions. The following sections move to the examination of the epinicians and the enkomia, as well as the question of the reperformances of his poems. The analysis of the whole corpus highlights the productive tension between the emphasis on performance and the emphasis on the text’s capability to transcend it, arguing that this is one of the key defining traits of Pindaric poetry.

A ‘thick’ theory of singular causation, incorporating enough detail to allow you to know how to evidence singular causation, is required for empirical investigation of singular causal claims. The term ‘mechanism’ is often employed in describing how a cause produces its effect on any particular occasion. Here we point out that this term is ambiguous between the step-by-step process by which a cause produces an outcome, the underlying conditions that afford causal processes and the causal principles under which causes produce their effects.

Chapter 5 distinguishes three subtypes of inferential processes that go beyond the literal meanings of words and constructions, each of which has resulted in disputed meanings in lawsuits. The first involves inferences arising from information given in the immediate context. One dispute in a libel suit centered on whether there was a chain of reasoning in a tabloid magazine article that would lead readers unmistakably to the implicature that the plaintiff was being used for sex by a Hollywood celebrity. Another libel suit involved the alleged implication of racial profiling in a political campaign mailer. And the focus in another was on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and whether a speaker at a public forum did, or did not, “imply” that a particular named company was acting illegally and had violated it. The second type of inference arises from “the presumption of truth,” whereby sentences are normally understood to be making a claim the speaker believes to be true, unless this is explicitly qualified by a disclaimer. This was at the basis of a libel suit in which a tabloid magazine was accused of presenting a new theory of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in a way that was claimed to “imply” that the magazine endorsed it, so incriminating one of the individuals involved. The third type of inference arises from real-world knowledge and is commonly evoked for suggestive terms in trademark law. ROACH MOTEL is given as an illustration, and a detailed analysis is then provided for PERSONAL POST OFFICE, arguing that it is also suggestive.

In 1984, Winston Smith said that freedom is the right to step back from lies and say that 2 and 2 make 4. But today, even though we are free in Smith’s sense, someone else will say, loudly and repeatedly, that 2 and 2 make 5. And who will separate for us the wheat from the chaff? Therefore free speech is no longer always helpful, as thinkers like Mill and Holmes thought, in which case we must consider how to repair the marketplace for ideas so that we can advance in solid knowledge rather than drown in mere opinions. John Thompson suggested a “Trump Test,” whereby “public language… must distinguish between… grown up political discourse and outright nonsense.” This can be done in two ways. We can wait until our speakers and influencers fix their discourse, which may take many years, or we can fix the information system that conveys to us too many incorrect propositions. If we chose the second option, what needs to be done is clear. We must regulate the use of smart phones so as not to permit them to maintain a conversation that fractures modern society and muddles modern thinking. Of course, to overcome such a pleasant national addiction will require commitment to moderate political activism, and each of us must look for inspiration to that end. Thomas Paine told us that we have the power to remake the world. He did, and so can we.

The concluding Chapter 8 gives a summary of the language disputes covered in the previous seven chapters. It then tries to answer the general question about why these disputes have arisen in American courts among people who do not normally miscommunicate and disagree like this. Four reasons are given. First, in cases of ambiguity and multiple interpretations one side in the dispute paid insufficient attention to, or chose to ignore, the disambiguating role of context. Second, at the heart of the dispute there was often a subtle and complex aspect of linguistic meaning and comprehension that the theories and empirical methods of the language sciences are designed to explain. Their findings can provide relevant linguistic information to the triers of fact for legal decision-making, and these subtleties and complexities would often not have been appreciated without linguistic expertise. Third, there were regularly legal and financial advantages and benefits that were motivating each of the parties in the dispute. And fourth, some of the opinions delivered by language consultants were unhelpful because these “experts” had little expertise in relevant areas of the language sciences.

This chapter introduces the book’s central argument about the parallel development of ideas about context in anthropology and Wittgenstein’s philosophy. It situates both within broader ‘cultures of context’ in twentieth-century thought, while establishing key themes about form and formlessness. The introduction argues that anthropology’s current antiformalist stance represents not progress but a particular historical development that deserves examination. It outlines how the book will trace shifts from logic to language to life as models of context in both Wittgenstein and anthropology.