Contextual Reasoning

ABSTRACT. This programmatic paper is an attempt to connect some worries on the philosophy of language with some traditional views in artificial intelligence. After a short introduction to the notion of context in philosophy (§1), starting from the inventor of mathematical logic, Gottlob Frege, I list three debates in the philosophy of language where the solution is strongly undecided: (§2) the debate between holism and molecularism, (§3) the debate on the boundaries between semantics and pragmatics, (§4) the debate between explicit and implicit view of incomplete descriptions. These debates may be considered case studies on what is happening to the notion of context in philosophy in the first two decades of XXI century; they push us to look for a unifying framework in which to frame those worries: I propose to shift the attention towards a representation of the basic abilities required to navigate across contexts (§5). In the conclusion, I use some suggestions from computer sciences as a contribution towards a better definition of what is meant by " pragmatic competence " , strictly connected to the philosophical enterprise (§6).
https://www.openscience.fr/Contexts-in-philosophy-pragmatic-competence-as-filter

A novel contextual logic is presented that combines features of both multi-context systems and logics of context. Broadly, contextual logics are those with a formal notion of context — knowledge that is true only under specific assumptions. Multi-context systems use discrete logistic systems as individual contexts, related by meta-level rules, whereas logics of context partition a single knowledge base into contexts, related using object-level rules. The contextual logic presented here is strongly-local, in that knowledge and inference is discrete for individual contexts, but which are nevertheless part of a single logistic system that relates contexts at the object-level, so combining advantages of both. A deduc- tive system of contextual inference and a possible- worlds based semantics is given, with formal results including soundness and completeness, and a number of properties are examined.