Specious Present

Point of Departure

The term dates to the late 19th Century as discussed in the enwiki article.

DCP Discourse Contexts

• DCP has memory of episodes, and of the AKPERSONs sentences in those prior discourse.


• The discourse uses Domain Controlled English (DCE) which is adaptable to non-English via the Grammatical Framework (GF).


• During the real time of the dialog, the sentences as occurring in the dialog channel are parsed by DCP, in their natural order of occurrence. At a given moment the sentence currently being parsed is called the Now Sentence.


• The discourse context is maintained in a frame and semantic net system that makes the dynamic data of the domain available in a API available to conventional programming langs (PHP, js, etc).


• The specious present is the time frame of an episode of discourse between DCP and its users. It has a real time frame which is that of the real time of the dialog session between DCP and the user(s) from the first sentence by a DCP agent to the last one.


• The form of the Now Sentence is the Haskell code supporting the current GF judgment during the discourse parse.


• DCE is dynamic and grows with the domains it supports. DCP elicits knowledge of domains from users in the form of stories, documents, and the ongoing discourse in agent dialogs.


• DCP Prolog and Lisp internals are hidden to preserve flexibility but there are fixed interfaces for user extension in them and Haskell which is guaranteed to have forward migration support as the system matures and evolves.