This chapter presents select signs that show several common stylistic traits of written Chinese. They include classical Chinese elements, mixed lexical compounds with both classical and non-classical components, and classical Chinese grammatical features. There are also many ‘out of vocabulary’ items not usually found in dictionaries. They include aliases for place names and the numerous ad hoc and fleeting abbreviations, whose interpretation crucially depends on background knowledge.

This chapter flashes back to the first days of Sophie’s employment at the ICJ registry, and sees her and her girlfriend Norma mull over the socio-professional features of the international judicial community. The chapter lays the theoretical foundations of the book and provides the reader with pointers to interpret the unfolding of judicial proceedings. The international judicial community has a twofold structure, at once cooperative and competitive. On the one hand, its members work together to secure control on courts and tribunals and insulate their internal activities from outside interference. On the other hand, community members ceaselessly strive to maximize their relative capital in a ruthless struggle for authority and prestige. The practices of the community are patterned, as they present regularities over time; they are competent, as they rest on collective background knowledge; and they weave together the discursive and the material world. Thus, community practices are the vehicle of both continuity and change, constraint and freedom in international adjudication.

Chapter 4: Cognitive Issues in Reading. Underlying cognitive skills that support reading include the following: Implicit and explicit learning, frequency of experience with language, automaticity, statistical knowledge and statistical learning, associative learning and emergence (analogy), real-time processing skills (inhibition control, eager processing, predictive processing), speed of processing, the use of background knowledge, conceptualization and categorization, motivation and engagement, and contextual processing. Underlying cognitive skills are the keys to language learning and reading development. Specific concepts addressed include now-or-never processing, chunk-and-pass processing, connectionism, Rapid Automatic Naming (RAN), long-term memory and background knowledge, the several roles of context effects on reading, and semantic priming. The chapter concludes with implications for instruction.

This chapter has two combined aims. First, I point out that the standard fine-tuning argument for the multiverse, as discussed in the previous two chapters, differs crucially from paradigmatic instances of anthropic reasoning such as, notably, Dicke's and Carter's accounts of large number coincidences between large numbers in cosmology. The key difference is that the standard fine-tuning argument for the multiverse treats the existence of forms of life as calling for a response and suggests to infer the existence of a multiverse as the best such response. Anthropic reasoning of the type championed by Dicke and Carter, in contrast, assumes the existence of forms of life as background knowledge when assessing whether the large number coincidences are to be expected, given the competing theories. The second aim of this chapter is to propose a new fine-tuning argument for the multiverse, which – unlike the standard one – is structurally similar to Dicke's and Carter's accounts of large number coincidences. The new argument turns out to have the virtue of being immune to the inverse gambler's fallacy charge.

Cultural knowledge is a fundamental part of participating in intercultural communication. Our knowledge of the world – such as history, current issues, belief systems, and values – helps us navigate both the surface-level meaning of language and its cultural significance. Cultural knowledge allows us to participate in practices in social/cultural groups (e.g., knowing how to participate in the educational system or attending prayers). Without adequate or appropriate knowledge of the context, the message of our interlocutors remains incomplete, even if we comprehend the lexicon, grammar, or pragmatics accurately. This chapter explores different ways to organize knowledge that we need to learn for successful intercultural communication and how we develop this knowledge (i.e., sources of knowledge). At the end of the chapter, key concepts pertaining to cultural knowledge are connected to an intercultural communication-oriented pedagogy, with sample language-teaching activities.