Abstract
The notion of context is indispensable in discussions of meaning, but the word context has often been used in conflicting senses. In logic, the first representation of context as a formal object was by the philosopher C. S. Peirce; but for nearly eighty years, his treatment was unknown outside a small group of Peirce afficionados. In the early 1980s, three new theories included related notions of context: Kamp's discourse representation theory; Barwise and Perry's situation semantics; and Sowa's conceptual graphs, which explicitly introduced Peirce's approach to the AI community. More recently, John McCarthy and his students have begun to use a closely related notion of context as a basis for organizing and partitioning knowledge bases. Each of the theories has distinctive, but complementary ideas that can enrich the others, but the relationships between them are far from clear. This paper analyzes the semantic foundations of these theories and shows how McCarthy's ist(c,p) predicate can be interpreted in terms of the semantic notions underlying the others.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Barwise, Jon, Jean Mark Gawron, Gordon Plotkin, & Syun Tutiya, eds. (1991) Situation Theory and its Applications, CSLI, Stanford, CA.
Barwise, Jon, & John Perry (1983) Situations and Attitudes, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Burke, Tom (1991) “Peirce on truth and partiality,” in Barwise et al.(1991) (1991) pp. 115–146.
Cooper, Robin, & Hans Kamp (1991) “Negation in situation semantics and discourse representation theory,” in Barwise et al.(1991) (1991) pp. 311–333.
Devlin, Keith (1991) “Situations as mathematical abstractions,” in Barwise et al.(1991) (1991) pp. 25–39.
Frege, Gottlob (1879) Begriffsschrift, translated in Jean van Heijenoort, ed. (1967) From Frege to Gödel, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 1–82.
Genesereth, Michael R., & Richard E. Fikes (1992) Knowledge Interchange Format, Reference Manual, Version 3.0, Report Logic-92-1, Computer Science Department, Stanford University.
Guha, R. V. (1991) Contexts: A Formalization and Some Applications, Technical report ACT-CYC-423-91, MCC, Austin, TX.
Houser, N., D. D. Roberts, & J. Van Evra, eds. (1995) Studies in the Logic of Charles Sanders Peirce, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Kamp, Hans (1981) “Events, discourse representations, and temporal references,” Langages 64, 39–64.
Lenat, Douglas B., & R. V. Guha (1990) Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.
McCarthy, John (1990) Formalizing Common Sense, Ablex, Norwood, NJ.
McCarthy, John (1993) “Notes on formalizing context,” Proc. IJCAI-93, Chambéry, France, pp. 555–560.
McCarthy, John, & Saša Buvač (1994) Formalizing Context, Technical Note STAN-CS-TN-94-13, Stanford University. Available from http://sail.stanford.edu.
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1885) “On the algebra of logic,” American Journal of Mathematics, vol. 7, pp. 180–202. Reprinted in Peirce (W) vol. 5.
Peirce, Charles Sanders (CP) Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce, ed. by C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, & A. Burks, 8 vols., Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1931–1958.
Peirce, Charles Sanders (W) Writings of Charles S. Peirce, vols. 1–5, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1982–1993.
Roberts, Don D. (1973) The Existential Graphs of Charles S. Peirce, Mouton, The Hague.
Schröder, Ernst (1890–1895) Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik, 3 vols., Teubner, Leipzig. Reprinted by Chelsea Publishing Co., Bronx, NY, 1966.
Sowa, John F. (1984) Conceptual Structures: Information Processing in Mind and Machine, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.
Sowa, John F. (1990) “Crystallizing theories out of knowledge soup,” in Z. W. Ras & M. Zemankova, eds., Intelligent Systems: State of the Art and Future Directions, Ellis Horwood, New York, p. 456–487.
Sowa, John F. (1991) “Towards the expressive power of natural language,” in J. F. Sowa, ed. (1991) Principles of Semantic Networks: Explorations in the Representation of Knowledge, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Mateo, CA, pp. 157–189.
Sowa, John F. (1993) “Logical foundations for representing object-oriented systems,“ Journal of Experimental and Theoretical AI, vol. 5, nos. 2&3, pp. 237–261.
Sowa, John F., & Eileen C. Way (1986) “Implementing a semantic interpreter for conceptual graphs,” IBM Journal of Research and Development 30:1, pp. 57–69.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1995 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sowa, J.F. (1995). Syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of contexts. In: Ellis, G., Levinson, R., Rich, W., Sowa, J.F. (eds) Conceptual Structures: Applications, Implementation and Theory. ICCS 1995. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 954. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60161-9_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60161-9_25
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-60161-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49539-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive