  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 [1]
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 [2, 3]. 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.
