Specious Present

Point of Departure

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

DCP DCE Discourse

• DCP has memory of interaction with AKPERSONs and the content of prior discourse episodes in addition to other knowledge it maintains for domains.


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


• 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 its agent served channels.


• The discourse context is maintained in a frame and semantic net system that makes the dynamic data of the domain available in a programming lang neutral API usable by conventional programming (PHP, python, etc).


• During the real time of the discourse session, which is called a 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 form of the Now Sentence is the Haskell code supporting the current GF judgment during the discourse parse.


• The specious present is the time frame of a DCP dialog with its users. It begins with the first sentence by a DCP agent in the dialog channel and ends when DCP closes the connection.


• The Now Sentence is a moment in the real time of the Specious Present whose action logic is Golog in Haskell.


• DCP Haskell, Lisp and Prolog/Logtalk internals are hidden to preserve flexibility but with defined stable API for user extension in those langs which is guaranteed to have forward migration support as the system matures and evolves.