# 1999/5/7
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# Context #
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1. Background
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When I studied the fundamental nature of concept-formation, I focused on
definitions, and the associated concept-hierarchy. There are three
methods of defining a concept, e.g.
person is either man or woman # integration
man is person with sex=male # differentiation
Dick is Richard H. McCullough # identity
Combining all definitions yields a genus-species concept-hierarchy.
I call this concept-hierarchy a view. The phrase
at view=v
denotes the concept-hierarchy named v.
McCarthy's notation
ist(c,p)
is written as
at c p
in my KR language. If the at phrase is omitted, c defaults
to the current context. My notation provides a convenient method
of specifying nested contexts.
The Situation Semantics notation
c |= p
is written as
at c p
in my KR language.
2. Beliefs and knowledge and context
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A belief is a guess about reality.
Knowledge is an identification of a fact of reality.
In other words, knowledge is a sequence of true propositions;
belief is a sequence of propositions which are either true or false.
Each person (or agent) has his/her personal beliefs and knowledge.
For simplicity, I will discuss only my knowledge and my context.
My context is all of my current knowledge.
To illustrate what this means, I record my knowledge as
a sequence of true propositions.
kn is p0;p1;...pn-1;pn
If I partition my knowledge between pn-1 and pn,
the explicit context of pn is
cx is p0;p1;...;pn-1
The definition context of pn is
cd is sequence of definitions of all concepts of kn.
The implicit context of pn is
ci is sequence of all propositions logically implied by cx and cd.
As above, my knowledge and context can be characterized as
a concept-hierarchy and labeled by a view name.
3. Truth
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Propositions can be classified into the following categories.
axiom implicit in all facts and knowledge
percept internal sense data
measurement external data
definition based on current knowledge
conclusion logically implied by the above propositions
belief a guess
Axiom, percept, measurement are true;
they are the foundation of all knowledge.
Definition, conclusion, belief may be true or false.
4. Actions and events
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To integrate actions and events into my KR language, I introduce
a space-time context.
at space=s,time=t,view=v p
where
s is space where action/event occurs
t is time when action/event occurs
v is the context of knowledge at s,t as defined above
Examples