notes on formalizing context（笔记形式化上下文）.pdfVIP

NOTES ON FORMALIZING CONTEXT  John McCarthy Computer Science Department Stanford University Stanford CA USA email jmccsstanfordedu Abstract These notes discuss formalizing contexts as rst class ob jects The basic relation is ist c p It asserts that the pr oposition p is true in the context c The most imp ortant formulas relate the prop osition s true in dierent contexts Intro ducing contexts as formal ob jects will p ermit ax iomatizations in limited contexts to b e expanded to transcend the original limitations This seems necessary to provide AI programs using logic with certain capabiliti es that human fact representation and human reasoning p ossess Fully implementing transcendence seems to require further ex tensions to mathematical logic ie b eyond the nonmonotonic inference metho ds rst invented in AI and now studied as a new domain of logic Various notations are considered but these notes are tentative in not prop osing a single language with all the desired capabilitie s Intro duction These notes contain some of the reasoning b ehind the prop osals of McCarthy to intro duce contexts as formal ob jects The present prop osals are incomplete and tentative In particular the formulas are not what we will eventually want and I will feel free to use formulas in discussions of dierent applications that arent always compatible with each other While I dithered RV Guha wrote his dissertation Our ob ject is to intro duce contexts as abstract mathematical entities with prop erties useful in articial intelligence Our attitude is therefore a computer scienc