Rich Thomason
Papers on the Logic of Context and Contextual Reasoning


 My work on the logic of context tries to bring together the older ideas of Richard Montague
 and David Kaplan with more recent attempts to formalize context in logical AI,
 especially John McCarthy's ideas.

 The basic idea I am trying to develop is that a type-theoretic formalism,
 based on Montague's Intensional Logic but with suitable extensions of the logical
 apparatus, provides a natural and adequate foundation for the logic of context.
 

 

     
  1. "Type Theoretic Foundations for Context, Part 1: Contexts as
    Complex Type-Theoretic Objects."

    2.           Discusses how to represent contexts in a type-theoretic
            framework.
            1999.     PostScript.
     
  2.  "Contextual Intensional Logic: Type-Theoretic and Dynamic
             Considerations."

    3.         Develops and refines the framework, adding dynamic operators. 
            2001.     Postscript     PDF
     
  3.  "Three Interactions between Context and Epistemic Locutions."

    4.         Discusses interactions between time of evaluation and knowledge,
           risk and belief, and distributed knowledge and epistemic 'might'.
                  2007.    PDF