The title says it all, really.

For a Philosophy essay, I would like to describe [scope](https://www.thoughtco.com/scope-2034287), in its programming sense of being:

* Nestable: you can have a scope within a scope
* Hierarchical: a child scope knows everything something *outside* the scope knows, but not vice-versa necessarily
* Carries information, beyond just a 'point-of-view' or 'frame of reference' - the scope *is* the information, as far as the observer is considered (sort of a physics-y relativity sense)

As aforementioned, I've thought of a few common idioms, but none of them reflect what I'm looking for: when I've tried to use 'scope' or any of the above examples while trying to explain my concepts to someone, they either misunderstood or simply did not get what I was trying to say: this is where I started to suspect that my usage of the word 'scope', as I first learned it and have always used it - in the programming sense - does not really translate to the lay-person usage, since 'scope' also has quite different meanings, most typically:

> 
> the extent of the area or subject matter that something deals with or to which it is relevant.
> 
> 
> *"we widened the scope of our investigation"*
> 
> 
> 

That's why I'm looking for an **alternative to this otherwise perfect word, but one which doesn't have alternative meanings, and is unambiguous to non-programmers**. I'm fine with using obscure words/terminology, I just want something that doesn't have conflating meanings I need to separate. (idioms/figures of speech, like those mentioned, are also fine)