COMMONSENSE KNOWLEDGE MACHINERY IN UNDERSTANDING INFORMATION

John gave a ball to Jack. What all have I understood when I say I have understood this sentence? One thing I understand is - Before this (John giving the ball to Jack) happened, there were John and Jack existing/being. Then, John gave the ball to Jack. How do I say that John and Jack existed before? If you are doing something, then you are alive. If you are alive now, you were alive just before too. This gets processed by my commonsense. The fact that I process that John and Jack existed before is evidenced by the fact that one way in which I can explain the meaning of this sentence is - “There is a John. There is a Jack. And the former gave a ball to Jack” (like a story). The first two sentences are the evidence. Why did I create a story like this? One reason - Temporal sequence of events is always a good way to understand something. So basically by using that commonsense what I have done is a temporal dissection of the sentence. Another reason - it's always good to lay down the facts before stating the connections/relations amongst them. That helps comprehension. What was the mechanism of the commonsense processing? 1) I want a temporal sequence. That directly relates to ‘context’ - context is always “before in time”. Context explains the background scenario or the backdrop. John and Jack existing before is the backdrop / background scenario and thus the context for understanding this sentence. So we see that one direction for commonsense machinery to work in is to extract the context of the given information. Another thing I understand is - John gave the ball with his hands to Jack. How did this commonsense processing work? The presence of ‘ball’ in the part “gave a ball”. Balls are generally held in and handed over (given, in this case) via hands into the other person’s hands. Why did this process work? On being told that a ball was given to Jack by John, a followup logical story-completion question asking for more details, (which is a trait of understanding), which arose in the mind was - how was it given? Here is a basic link-list of - information and typical follow-up questions - which express the nature of our commonsense understanding process of anything given to us. Thing - what is it? Person - who is he? Process/action - how? Relation/connection - why? These get processed by default in the mind upon coming across information-elements. Answers to these questions are by commonsense if the information is commonplace, otherwise by asking the question to the source. So the 2 directions in which commonsense knowledge machinery works on given information, are towards context (for general comprehension requirements) and “picture-completion” (for specialized follow-up details)