Matt Bonham collaborated in this research with Victor Sergeev and Pavel Parshin to analyze cognitive maps constructed from exchanges
       between President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev on the test-ban negotiations. A comparison of the negotiations over time reveals the
       emergence of new knowledge structures that were hypothesized to facilitate the 1963 agreement on nuclear testing. To complete this
       research, Matt and his colleagues had to develop a framework for investigating the ontological pre-understandings that lie behind political
       texts and develop new coding rules, called "processual coding," to code the holistic views that lie behind many Soviet texts.

       The framework for the analysis, which was developed by the authors in the early 1990s, is summarized briefly below, along with audio
       excerpts of discussions with Victor Sergeev, which took place in Moscow in December 1990. These conversations became the basis of "The
       Limited Test-Ban Agreement: Emergence of New Knowledge Structures in International Negotiation," International Studies Quarterly
        (1997) 41, 215-240.

       Finally, illustrations of the processual and procedural codings of the texts of the limited test ban negotiations are shown for Khrushchev and
       Kennedy.

A Typology of Ontological Pre-Understandings

         Three types of ontological pre-understandings, each leading to a different representation of knowledge, can be identified:

        1. The nominalistic view is based on a one-level, purely "surface" ontology that divides the world into simple "atomic" objects. This view
            attempts of understand the behavior of others as a reaction to an immediate stimulus, with no structural relations between objects.