I am concerned with the development of a theory of computer comprehension of descriptive contexts. By "descriptive contexts" I refer to the language of scientific books, text books, of this text etc. An important characteristic of these contexts is the predominance of descriptive predicates and verbs (verbs such as "contain", "refer", "Consist of", ...) over action verbs. In the distinction performative vs. declarative, descriptive texts clearly fall in the declarative side. Most of the best work on natural language has dealt with contexts in which the computer understanding depends on the meaning of the action verbs and the human actions (plans, goals) indicated by them. This work has had very little bearing on a theory of computer understanding of descriptive contexts. One of the main tenets of my research is that descriptive contexts call for different theoretical ideas from those proposed for the understanding of human actions, although there are some points of contact.