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Next: 2.20. Asserting Beliefs Up: 2. BUILDING AND FINDING Previous: 2.18. EXERCISE: Finding Information,

2.19. Building Nodes

Sometimes we might want to build nodes without asserting them. This is done with the SNePSUL command build, which, like assert and find, takes relation-node pairs as arguments (UM§§1.4, 2.7).

Suppose that John has some beliefs about things that can fly, and suppose that Cassie has some beliefs about what John believes. It might be the case (in fact, it will probably be the case) that Cassie's beliefs and John's beliefs will differ. So, when Cassie represents John's beliefs, she might not assert them. (She would only assert them if she herself believed them, too.) E.g., suppose John believes that Opus can fly. Note that Cassie has no beliefs one way or the other about Opus's ability to fly. Let's tell Cassie that John believes that Opus can fly. To do this, we'll first have to have a way to represent Cassie's beliefs about John's beliefs. We'll do this with an agent-act-object case frame. (For more on this, see "SNePS and Knowledge, Belief, and Intensionality".) So, first
we need some new arcs:

(Note that SNePS reminds us that object has already been defined.)


next up previous
Next: 2.20. Asserting Beliefs Up: 2. BUILDING AND FINDING Previous: 2.18. EXERCISE: Finding Information,
William J. Rapaport 2003-09-22