Identity, Context, and everything...

The link is to a lively thread, jumping into the middle, where Peter P. Jones opens the floodgates on a discussion about context. No point in doing all the obligitory quotes here. Just go read the thread. But, hey, two quotes do stand out, following Peter's thesis on context as geometry.

Dennis E. Hamilton:

There's a book called "Metaphor and Reality" by Phillip Wheelwright that has a tangential bearing on this topic. The phrase that sticks in my mind is this: "machines have contexts, people have perspectives."

and Murray Altheim:

I'm not sure if you're aware, but there's a whole subdomain within the Knowledge Representation/Structures community devoted to issuesof context, which seems to be headed up by Patrick Brezillon.