Recent years have seen new general notions of contextuality emerge. Most of these employ context-independent symbols to represent random variables in different contexts. As an example, the operational theory of (Spekkens in Phys Rev A 71(5):52108, 2005) treats an observable being measured in two different contexts identically. Non-contextuality in this approach is the impossibility of drawing ontological distinctions between identical elements of the operational theory. However, a recent collection of work seeks to exploit context-dependent symbols of random variables to interpret contextuality (Kujala et al. in Phys Rev Lett 115(15):150401, 2015; Dzhafarov and Kujala in Phys Scr T163:014009, 2014). This approach associates contextuality with the possibility of imposing a particular joint distribution on random variables recorded under different experimental contexts. This paper compares these two different treatments of random variables and highlights the limitations of the context-dependent approach as a physical theory.

近年来，出现了有关上下文的新通用概念。其中大多数使用上下文无关的符号来表示不同上下文中的随机变量。例如，（Spekkens in Phys Rev A 71（5）：52108，2005）的操作理论将在两个不同上下文中测量的可观测对象等同地对待。这种方法的非上下文性是不可能在操作理论的相同要素之间进行本体论区别的。但是，最近的工作集试图利用上下文相关的解释上下文的随机变量的符号（Kujala等人在Phys Rev Lett 115（15）：150401，2015; Dzhafarov和Kujala在Phys Scr T163：014009，2014）。这种方法将上下文与将特定联合分布强加于在不同实验上下文下记录的随机变量的可能性相关联。本文比较了随机变量的这两种不同处理方式，并强调了上下文相关方法作为一种物理理论的局限性。