Subject: power
Date: July 27, 2002
From: Dick McCullough
To:   Richard Latimer

I agree with you -- "power" is an attribute,
the potential or ability to perform an action.
Taking two of your examples, I would represent
them as
	man has power = [move oneself, think]
or
	man has mobility, reason

I generally prefer the first form, just to avoid
introducing lots of extra, unnecessary concepts.

The current KR way of representing them is

	man do* move oneself, think done

where "do*" denotes the power, as opposed to "do"
which denotes an event -- an actual occurence of
an action.  I'm not really crazy about using "do*",
but it does have the advantage of allowing you to
qualify the action with any of the prepositions
("od","in","out","with","from","to") as appropriate.

With respect to "instrument" and "end", those are
the kind of action modifiers that "with" is intended
to handle.  Using another of your examples, I would
represent it as (I like "purpose" better than "end")

	literacy is power=read
	literate human has literacy
	literate human do* read + evaluate od book
		with instrument = [eyes, brain],
		     purpose = [comprehend, communicate]
		done