Pat,  (01)
I sympathize with your attitude toward much of the loose talk
about contexts:  (02)
> ... But in normal assertional logic, the quantifiers are the
 > only such name-binding operators. Of course all these languages
 > can be rendered down into functors applied to a single binder,
 > usually lambda.  (03) 
I'm happy with that.  (04)
> BUt contexts in context logic play a rather different role: in 
> particular, there is no explicit name binding syntax, only the notion 
> that a name may (or may not) denote differently when asserted 
> relative to a context. Contextual assertion is more like inclusion 
> inside a modal operator than being in a syntactic binding scope.  (05) 
I prefer very simple formal definitions: a "concept" is a node
in a conceptual graph, and a "context" is a box into which you put
such graphs.  (06)
They way I represent talk about a dog or a flea or the kitchen sink
as a context is straightforward:  (07)
 1. I use the binding mechanism (such as the existential quantifier)
 to represent the thing that is called a context (dog, flea, or
 sink) by a variable x.  (08)
 2. Then I use the "that" operator of IKL to represent the context
 box and its nested CGs as a proposition p.  (09)
 3. Finally, I use a *description* relation (Dscr) to link #1 and
 #2 by Dscr(x,p).  (010)
I have never seen any theory of contexts with a coherent set of
axioms that cannot be represented (with a considerable increase
in clarity) by restating the axioms by the above method (possibly
with some additional relations and types, such as Situation or World).  (011)
John  (012)
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