Franck Lihoreau

Epistemology, Context, and Formalism

The main purpose of the present volume is to advance our understanding of the notions of knowledge and context, the connections between them and the ways in which they can be modeled, in particular formalized a question of prime importance and utmost relevance to such diverse disciplines as philosophy, linguistics, computer science and artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Bringing together essays written by world-leading experts and emerging researchers in epistemology, logic, philosophy of language, linguistics and theoretical computer science, the book examines the formal modeling of knowledge and the knowledge-context link at one or more of three intersections - context and epistemology, epistemology and formalism, formalism and context and presents a novel range of approaches to the current discussions that the connections between knowledge, language, action, reasoning and context continually enlivens. It develops powerful ideas that will push the relevant fields forward and give a sense of the new directions in which mainstream and formal research on knowledge and context is heading.

Reasoning About Knowledge in Context

In this paper we lay out the conceptual and technical foundations of a general framework that will allow us to talk and reason about the connections between knowledge and context. Based on the notion of “contextual models” !contextual , a first section on “static formalism ” will make it possible to capture using the same language and the same semantics , a number of epistemological positions amongst those most prominent in the recent philosophical literature on knowledge , and to investigate the logical properties and connections they end up attaching to their respective notions of knowledge and context . This “static” component is augmented with a “dynamic” formalization of context based on a simplified version of Discourse Representation Theory, which will allow us to account for the contribution of epistemic statements to the evolution of the “score” of a conversation about knowledge .