Scope note

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This class models time-indexed situations as phenomena in time and physical space whose identity does not depend on intrinsic criteria but on the perspective of the observer that cuts out the situation from a more complex or long lasting phenomenon. The coherence or identity of an epistemic situation is thus provided by a specific, arbitrary choice of the observer and this class is therefore disjoint with the crm:E4 Period class whose identity is intrinsic.

The Epistemic Situation class  includes situations in reality that are sliced up both in terms of temporal duration and of the restriction of a particular aspect of complex phenomena. For example, if we consider the economic activity of a country during a civil year, and measure different aspects of it, the life of this physical and social phenomenon does not stop to exist at the 31th of December of that year, nor it is limited to economy. An epistemic situation thus cuts out a portion of a more complex phenomenon for the sake of observation and research. It is somehow constructed by simplification and choice of specifc aspects of the phenomenon.

An epistemic situation can also concern the absence of a phenomenon, like the known not-being-present of a person at an event. The phenomenon expressed by the available information is only epistemic, in the sense of knowledge about a situation not realized as such in time and space but still observable as an absence of the concerned phenomenon.

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