Semantic Memory — References

The origin of the term, the representational traditions for standing claims, and the hazard of storing something that is asserted rather than observed.

The term

• Episodic and Semantic Memory — Endel Tulving, in Organization of Memory, edited by Endel Tulving and Wayne Donaldson, Academic Press, 1972. The chapter that named the store of decontextualised knowledge and separated it from memory for occasions. Cited by name.
• Declarative and Nondeclarative Memory: Multiple Brain Systems Supporting Learning and Memory — Larry R. Squire, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 1992. Situates knowledge that can be stated within a broader taxonomy of what gets retained. Cited by name.

Representing standing claims

• RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract Syntax — the subject-predicate-object model, and the questions it forces: what identifies a subject, what controls the predicate vocabulary, and what it means for two statements to be about the same thing.
• SHACL: Shapes Constraint Language — a way to state and validate what a well-formed claim about an entity must look like, which is the mechanism behind rejecting a malformed belief at write time rather than at retrieval.
• The Architecture of Cognition — John R. Anderson, Harvard University Press, 1983. The declarative knowledge store in a cognitive architecture, including activation-based retrieval and the role of recency and frequency in it. Cited by name.

Why written-down claims drift from the truth

• Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction: An Example of the Interaction Between Language and Memory — Elizabeth F. Loftus and John C. Palmer, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1974. Evidence that how a question is phrased changes what is subsequently reported as remembered — the hazard at the heart of extracting beliefs from dialogue with a prompt. Cited by name.

No verified reference is recorded for belief extraction from conversational transcripts, for confirmation thresholds before promotion, or for confidence calibration on model-inferred claims. These are active engineering practice without a settled published basis.