The objective conception of context and its logic

Situation Theory originated as an attempt to provide mathematical foundations for Situation Semantics, a research programme initiated by Jon Barwise and John Perry in the 1980s. It developed into a general theory of information. This chapter provides a systematic development of Situation Theory, using an account of `structural relations', based on Peter Aczel's pioneering work in non-well-founded set theory. It starts with the question of how to represent Situation-Theory-style information in a standard relational structure, and goes on to articulate a theory of structural relations, and uses this to address various topics such as circularity, argument roles, partiality, substitution and abstraction. The final section addresses truth and logic in Situation Theory, and the concept of internal definability.

Objective and Cognitive Context, 1999

… of the 4th decennial conference on …, 2005

During the last few years, there have been debates over what is context and how computers should act upon it. Two disparate camps of thought can be recognized. First, Realism, having its roots in natural sciences, believes that contexts exist out there and that, if properly instrumented and programmed, computers can correctly recognize and adapt to them. Second, Constructivism, having its roots in human and social sciences, believes that contexts are human creations, mental and social, and that computers ought to provide resources for managing them. We reveal some fundamental differences between the two in three different application domains. We show that despite the deep-going controversies, both camps benefit from considering the alternative approach and a middle ground can be found.

Journal of Literary Theory (JLT), 2014

Theories of meaning, even outspokenly textualist ones, have always dealt with the question of relevant context as well, to some extent at least. In many fields of research, the idea of an encompassing theory of context has surfaced now and then, and there have also been actual attempts at such a theory, some of which are discussed in this article. At the same time the very concept of context is difficult in many ways. The term has been said to be one of the most widely used and widely abused terms in the humanities and social sciences. Brenda Dervin claims that »there is no term that is more often used, less often defined, and when defined defined so variously as context« (Dervin 1997, 13-14). More specifically, its analytical force suffers from the fact that it encompasses such a vast array of different elements. The many concepts that clearly deal with the relationship between text and context, however in a more limited or specific way, are one proof of this.

2019

The idea of context and contextual relations is so widespread in all sub-disciplines of the humanities and social sciences that one might call it a key paradigm. However, exactly how theory conceives of context and how context is analyzed deserves critical examination. For various reasons, some theories’ presuppose¬tions especially can be contested. This investigation aims to clarify the idea of context and contextual relations, explore a number of critical positions, and offer a generic model for contextual analysis. Its overall argument rejects the critique that context is a sociological simulacrum, positing instead that “context” has an open and plural meaning, which needs to be modeled on a case specific basis.

Philosophical studies, 2000

Arxiv preprint cmp-lg/9712003, 1997

I take issue in this talk with AI formalizations of context, primarily the formalization by McCarthy and Buvač, that regard context as an undefined primitive whose formalization can be the same in many different kinds of AI tasks. In particular, any theory of context in natural language must take the special nature of natural language into account and cannot regard context simply as an undefined primitive. I show that there is no such thing as a coherent theory of context simpliciter-context pure and simple-and that context in natural language is not the same kind of thing as context in KR. In natural language, context is constructed by the speaker and the interpreter, and both have considerable discretion in so doing. Therefore, a formalization based on pre-defined contexts and pre-defined 'lifting axioms' cannot account for how context is used in real-world language.

Foundations of Science, 2015

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To appear in the forthcoming volume "Trends in Logic" edited by Baltag and Smets

We recall a largely forgotten intellectual project: that of providing a formal theory of situations that does justice to informal ideas about situations and informa- tion flow with the ‘situation theory’ community of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Instead of defending specific desiderata, and in the spirit of Barwise’s ‘Branch Points’, we record some the difficulties that defined the project by posing a se- ries of twelve questions. Drawing on the theory of channels and information flow (Barwise and Seligman, late 1990s), with some modifications and extensions, we provide a version of situation theory that answers some of these questions. One of the main extensions is to allow probabilistic constraints. We also consider a more recent proposal by van Benthem to capture many of situation theory’s insights using a modal logic closely related to dependancy logic and use this as an alternative but comparable way of answering our questions.

Education Sciences, 2018

This article aims to clarify the concept of context. Our motivation is the lack of consensus on what context is, despite common accept of the claim that learning is context-dependent to some degree, and despite a widespread interest in researching learning in specific contexts such as museums, classrooms, or workplace settings. We provide a minimal concept which is applicable to all references to context, properly construed. We point out that more general considerations of contextuality and compositionality must be reconciled and balanced out if the role of context in relation to learning is to be understood. We then flesh out the minimal concept with a typology of context categories relevant for understanding the significance of context for learning. The categories are location, understood both in a physical-geographical and an institutional sense, knowledge domain, sequence of occurrences, activity, historical period, social relationship, and horizon of significance. We illustrate...