Belief projection: what an agent holds true

• Covers: (believes Agent P) — answered by proving P inside Agent's own context rather than in the asker's, so agents may disagree without the KB contradicting itself. modalPredicate / register-modal-predicate open the same machinery to knows, desires, intends. The opacity of P: which party's equality merges may rewrite a term inside a belief.
• Not here: a modal logic — no K/T/4/5 schema, and a nested (believes A (believes B P)) projects only where the marker is visible — nothing by default, since an independent agent context cannot see the grant (see below); hypothetical worlds → abduction.md. The de re reading of a belief, and any operator for a group of agents.
• Assumes: context, genlCx visibility, the prover registry → contexts.md, glossary.md; the equality partition → equality.md.

Two agents can believe contradictory things without the KB being inconsistent — that is what a context lattice is for, and the engine already has the lattice. What belief projection adds is one convention and one prover over it: no new belief primitive, no change to the JTMS, the taxonomy or the index.

;; Alice's beliefs are ordinary facts in Alice's own context.
(v/assert kb '(flies Tweety) 'CxAgentAlice)

(v/ask? kb '(believes Alice (flies Tweety)) 'CxWell)   ; => true
(v/ask? kb '(believes Bob   (flies Tweety)) 'CxWell)   ; => false — not Bob's context
(v/ask? kb '(flies Tweety) 'CxWell)                    ; => false — base believes nothing

(believes Alice (flies Tweety)) is (flies Tweety) asked in CxAgentAlice. The agent symbol names the context by a fixed convention — Alice ↦ CxAgentAlice (vaelii.impl.modal) — and a generated name passes exactly the checks a hand-written context name does (naming/context?), so nothing downstream can tell a minted agent context from any other. A variable in the proposition binds through the projection: (believes Alice (flies ?x)) answers {?x Tweety}.

The prover

BeliefProjectionProver (in vaelii.impl.provers, in default-provers) recognizes a modal goal and sub-queries the inner sentence in the agent's context. Four decisions:

• Applicable to a registered modal predicate, of arity 2, whose agent argument is ground and yields a legal context name, over a sentence-shaped proposition. An unbound agent — (believes ?who P) — is not claimed: that would mean "search every agent's context", a different and far costlier operation, so it is excluded and left to whatever else answers it.
• Cost :compute — a projection is a sub-query through the registry, not a lookup.
• Completeness 50 — it augments. (believes A P) may also be a plain stored fact, and believes is a real relation you may want to assert; the fact prover stays in play, and a stored belief and a projected one fold to one answer rather than double-counting.
• Solve proves P in the agent's context — the agent's, never the asker's, which is what keeps one agent's beliefs out of another's answers.

The headline property: contradictory agents coexist

(v/assert kb '(flies Tweety)       'CxAgentAlice)
(v/assert kb '(not (flies Tweety)) 'CxAgentBob)

(v/ask? kb '(believes Alice (flies Tweety))       'CxWell)  ; => true
(v/ask? kb '(believes Bob   (not (flies Tweety))) 'CxWell)  ; => true
(v/conflicts kb)       ; => []  — the two share no context, so no settle ever sees a clash
(v/contradictions kb)  ; => []

Alice's CxAgentAlice and Bob's CxAgentBob share no genlCx ancestor, so no context sees both the claim and its negation and no contradiction is raised. This is the property no Datalog / SPARQL / DL rival can field, and it falls out of the lattice by construction rather than being engineered here.

Independence, and inheriting base

An agent context has no genlCx edge by default, so it is independent: the agent believes exactly what is asserted in its context, and nothing true in base leaks in. That is the honest default for modal use — an agent who believes a falsehood should not thereby contradict base. To let an agent see base too, add the edge yourself:

(v/assert kb '(green Grass) 'CxUniverse)                 ; a base fact
(v/ask? kb '(believes Alice (green Grass)) 'CxWell)      ; => false — Alice is independent
(v/assert kb '(genlCx CxAgentBob CxUniverse) 'CxUniverse); Bob opts in
(v/ask? kb '(believes Bob (green Grass)) 'CxWell)        ; => true

Opacity: the proposition is a mention

An attitude is opaque. From Oedipus believes he married Jocasta and Jocasta is his mother it does not follow that Oedipus believes he married his mother — that is the whole of the tragedy, and it is what makes a belief different from an ordinary two-place fact. So P in (believes Agent P) is a mention: a sentence named as syntax, not a sentence the reader may normalize.

(v/assert kb '(marriedTo Oedipus Jocasta) 'CxAgentOedipus)   ; what he believes
(v/assert kb '(sameAs Jocasta MotherOfOedipus) 'CxUniverse)  ; what the ASKER knows

(v/ask? kb '(believes Oedipus (marriedTo Oedipus Jocasta))         'CxUniverse) ; => true
(v/ask? kb '(believes Oedipus (marriedTo Oedipus MotherOfOedipus)) 'CxUniverse) ; => false

The merge is real and the asker holds it: asked outside the quotation, either spelling normalizes to the class representative and the two are one question, exactly as equality.md describes. Inside it, nothing moves — the merges the asker believes are not the ones the agent does.

The agent's own merges do license the substitution, and license it for that agent alone. The projection runs the proposition in the agent's context, so it is normalized there — the ordinary rule that the reader is what elects, applied to the reader a projection actually has:

(v/assert kb '(marriedTo Oedipus Jocasta)      'CxAgentOedipus)
(v/assert kb '(sameAs Jocasta MotherOfOedipus) 'CxAgentOedipus)   ; HE holds the identity
(v/assert kb '(marriedTo Creon Jocasta)        'CxAgentCreon)     ; Creon does not

(v/ask? kb '(believes Oedipus (marriedTo Oedipus MotherOfOedipus)) 'CxUniverse) ; => true
(v/ask? kb '(believes Oedipus (marriedTo Oedipus Jocasta))         'CxUniverse) ; => true
(v/ask? kb '(believes Creon   (marriedTo Creon  MotherOfOedipus))  'CxUniverse) ; => false

That is the de dicto reading: the substitution goes through exactly when the agent holds the identity. The de re reading — "of his mother, Oedipus believes he married her", true whoever holds the identity — is a different question and the projector does not answer it.

Where the barrier sits, and what it covers

Congruence opacity lives in the one walk both migration and query go through (res/representative-term), not at the read door. That is what keeps the two in step: a merge migrates a stored (believes A P) no more than it rewrites the question, so the belief stays retrievable under the spelling it was asserted in rather than under one only the merge produces. res/without-retired reads the same walk, so a quoted spelling is not retired for a reader who never renamed it.

Three positions stay transparent, and each for a reason:

Position	Rewritten by the asker's merges	Why
the agent — (believes Oedipus …)	yes	the asker refers with it; merge Oedipus and KingOfThebes and it is one agent under two names
a non-sentence argument — (believes A Foo)	yes	it names a term, not a proposition; the projector declines that shape too
an ungranted predicate — (mutters A (…))	yes	opacity is what the modalPredicate marker buys; without it this is an ordinary relation

The other sentence-holding forms are transparent, and none of them is a quotation. (ist Ctx S) routes an assertion into Ctx — S is asserted, so it is used rather than named (contexts.md). An exceptWhen conjunct and an unknown are queries the engine runs on the reader's behalf, and they are normalized at the context that runs them (exceptions.md, naf.md). In each the engine is the one doing the believing, so the reader's merges are the right ones and congruence applies. An attitude is the case where somebody else is.

A rewriteOf spelling rename does reach into the quotation, exactly as it reaches into a quotingFunction's arguments: it retires a name, and both the belief and the question follow it. A sameAs / equals identity merge does not. That is the same split equality.md opens with — three relations, one closure, and only one of them is about spelling.

The marker is read globally here, where the projection reads it scoped. The two questions differ: whether a belief projects is a policy of the context that granted the marker, while whether an argument is a quotation is a fact about the sentence — and a reader-scoped answer to the second would migrate a stored belief for one context while holding it for another, after which neither could retrieve what the other had renamed.

Opacity here is congruence opacity. The oriented equational rewriting that runs after it (the schematic equals of equational.md) walks argument terms without reading the marker, so a schematic equation normalizes inside a quoted position as it does outside one.

More than one modal predicate

Which predicates project is a KB property, not a hard-coded set. believes ships granted in CxCore; knows, desires, intends are the same projection under a different predicate, and one assertion away:

(v/register-modal-predicate kb 'knows)   ; grants (modalPredicate knows) in CxCore
;; or scope the grant to one theory:
(v/register-modal-predicate kb 'knows 'CxPsychology)

(modalPredicate P) is read scoped from the asking context, exactly as abduciblePredicate is — so it is a policy of the context that grants it: one theory may read knows modally while another, seeing the same predicate, does not. An unregistered predicate is never projected, which is why the table is open but closed by default.

This scoping is also what governs nested belief. (believes A (believes B P)) proves (believes B P) in A's context, and the inner believes projects only if the grant is visible there. An independent CxAgentA cannot see the CxCore grant, so by default the inner believes is an ordinary literal and the nested query is simply false — there is no recursion to speak of. Give A a genlCx edge that reaches the grant and the nesting projects through. That is the whole of the nesting story: a consequence of where the marker is visible, not a modal-logic schema.

What is out of scope

It is query-only: the caller asserts an agent's beliefs into the agent context directly, and the projector reads them back — consistent with how unknown / thereExists are query-only operators. A belief that happens to match a base forward rule fires it like any other fact; an independent agent context may then have nowhere to place the conclusion, which surfaces as a harmless no-placement notice in violations, not a contradiction.

Out of scope: assertion routing (asserting (believes Alice P) to store P in Alice's context — a write that lands a different sentence elsewhere, for which no retraction-symmetric form exists), agent-context lifecycle (garbage-collecting or merging agent contexts), and modal logic proper. This is a projector, not a modal calculus.