1.6 KiB
Definite Description Resolution
When the user says "the function that validates secrets," the agent must resolve this to a specific code entity. Natural language is ambiguous — there might be multiple functions matching the description. Resolving to the wrong one causes incorrect actions.
Principia Mathematica's theory of descriptions addresses this: "the current king of France is bald" — a sentence that seems to refer to something that doesn't exist. PM formalizes ιx(φx) as "the unique x such that φ holds." A statement is false (not meaningless) when there is no unique x satisfying φ.
A cognitive tool that checks descriptional uniqueness before resolution:
(def-cognitive-tool :resolve-reference
(query-string &key (max-candidates 10)
(context-path *current-context*))
"Resolve a definite description to a unique referent."
(let ((candidates (search-knowledge-graph query-string
:source-path context-path
:limit max-candidates)))
(cond
((null candidates)
(values nil :no-referent query-string))
((> (length candidates) 1)
(values nil :ambiguous candidates))
(t
(values (first candidates) :unique nil)))))~40 lines as a skill in v0.7.2. When VivaceGraph ships (v3.0.0), descriptions become native Prolog queries with uniqueness constraints.
For the philosophical foundations, see the Whitehead analysis in the Validation section below.