Relational Reasoning about Contexts

Relational Reasoning about Contexts

Teleological Reasoning about Nature: Intentional or Relational

According to the theory of ‘promiscuous teleology’, we are naturally biased to (mistakenly) construe natural kinds as if they (like artifacts) were intentionally designed ‘for a purpose’. However, this theory introduces two paradoxes. First, if infants readily distinguish natural kinds from artifacts, as evidence suggests, why do school-aged children erroneously conflate this distinction? Secon...

Representing and Reasoning about Cultural Contexts in Intelligent Learning Environments

There is a growing interest within educational research to produce culturally-aware intelligent learning environments (ILEs) that capitalize on the affective benefits of positive cultural resonance and avoid the counter-productive effects of culturally ignorant designs. Several challenges arise when attempting to produce culturally-appropriate content for ILEs. These stem from the need for sema...

Reasoning about Uncertain Contexts in Pervasive Computing Environments

M ark Weiser envisioned computing environments that are pervaded with so many computing devices and sensors that they seem to disappear into the background, letting humans focus on daily tasks rather than on underlying technologies.1 To enable this vision, we must transform today’s “dumb,” context-insensitive, and isolated machines into intelligent, programmable, and context-aware clusters of m...

YAMLFRAC Yet Another Modal Logic For Reasoning About Contexts

In this paper, we introduce a general type of multicontext logics, by defining an algebraic structure for representing knowledge from different points of view and characterize a logic modeled by this structure. The basic components which will be used are posets which elements which will be considered as partial descriptions of a given system, and to each context will be associated such a poset....