On the dimensions of context dependence: Partiality, approximation, and perspective

Abstract

In this paper we propose to re-read the past work on formalizing context as the search for a logic of the relationships between partial, approximate, and perspectival theories of the world. The idea is the following. We start from a very abstract analysis of a context dependent representation into three basic elements. We briefly show that all the mechanisms of contextual reasoning that have been studied in the past fall into three abstract forms: expand/contract, push/pop, and shifting. Moreover we argue that each of the three forms of reasoning actually captures an operation on a different dimension of variation of a context dependent representation, partiality, approximation, and perspective. We show how these ideas are formalized in the framework of MultiContext Systems, and briefly illustrate some applications.