Context-Sensitive Event Occurrence Minimisation

When reasoning about an incompletely known narrative of events, it’s necessary to employ event occurrence minimisation in order to get the expected results from standard temporal projection techniques. However, a blanket default assumption that the known event occurrences are the only event occurrences is rarely legitimate. A finer grain of minimisation is required, which takes into account the possibility of unknown events when the blanket default assumption is inapplicable. This paper outlines a mechanism for achieving this, based on John McCarthy’s recent proposal for formalising context.