Axiomatizing Complex Concepts from Fundamentals

摘要

We have been engaged in the project of encoding commonsense theories of cognition, or how we think we think, in a logical representation. In this paper we use the concept of a “serious threat” as our prime example, and examine the infrastructure required for capturing the meaning of this complex concept. It is one of many examples we could have used, but it is particularly interesting because building up to this concept from fundamentals, such as causality and scalar notions, highlights a number of representational issues that have to be faced along the way, where the complexity of the target concepts strongly influences how we resolve those issues.