Introduction to Contextual Reasoning an Artificial Intelligence Perspective

The notion of context is called to account for a multifarious variety of phenomena. Since Frege's proposal of a principle of contextuality [8], context has had its place in philosophy of language (e.g. [2,15,19]). In Artificial intelligence (AI), McCarthy was the first to argue that formalizing context was a necessary step toward the designing of more general computer programs ([23], but see also [14,28,11,24]). Other work comes from cognitive science (e.g. [7,29,6,16]), where context is viewed as a way of structuring knowledge and modeling its usage in problem solving tasks. The motivations and the approaches to the problem of context are very different, and one might even wonder whether there is something as the problem of context, or rather a multiplicity of different problems very loosely related by the word "context". We will argue that most of the proposed notions of context can be looked at from a unifying perspective. However, before we are ready to defend this claim, a lot of preliminary work is needed.