Part One: Russell’s Promising Ideas on the Bearers of Truth and Falsity Russell had long worried about propositions. By 1906 he was exploring alternatives to them. By 1910 he renounced them. By 1912 he penned a chapter in his book The Problems of Philosophy sketching his ideas for replacing them. His goal was to do so within the parameters set by three self-imposed constraints: (i) truth bearer...

In β, contrary to what was the case in α, sentence (2) appears to be false. Examples like the card scenario can be multiplied, and seem to lead to the conclusion that the truth of sentences where ‘knowing which’ or ‘knowing who’ (henceforth ‘knowing-wh’) constructions occur is context-dependent. Consider again contexts α and β. It is appealing to adopt the view that one of the roles that these ...

The research described here is part of a larger project with the objective of determining if a writer believes a proposition to be true or false. This task requires a deep understanding of a proposition’s semantic context, which is far beyond NLP’s state of the art. In light of this difficulty, this paper presents a shallow semantic framework that addresses the sub-problem of finding a proposit...

This paper addresses the problem of probabilistic reasoning as it applies to Truth Maintenance Systems. A Belief Maintenance System hal! been constructed which manages a current set of probabilistic beliefs in much the same way that a TMS manages a set of true/false beliefs. Such a system may be thought of as a generalization of a. Truth Maintenance System. It enables one to reason using normal...

The research described here is part of a larger project with the objective of determining if a writer believes a proposition to be true or false. This task requires a deep understanding of a proposition’s semantic context, which is far beyond NLP’s state of the art. In light of this difficulty, this paper presents a shallow semantic framework that addresses the sub-problem of finding a proposit...

We introduce a subclass of Kripke’s fixed points in which falsehood is the preferred truth value. In all of these the truthteller evaluates to false, while the liar evaluates to undefined (or overdefined). The mathematical structure of this family of fixed points is investigated and is shown to have many nice features. It is noted that a similar class of fixed points, preferring truth, can also...

Deciding matters of legal liability, in torts and other civil actions, requires deciding causation. The injury suffered by a plaintiff must be caused by an event or condition due to the defendant. The courts distinguish between cause-in-fact and proximate causation, where cause-in-fact is determined by the “but-for” test: the effect would not have happened, “but for” the cause.1 Proximate causa...

In practical data integration systems, it is common for the data sources being integrated to provide conflicting information about the same entity. Consequently, a major challenge for data integration is to derive the most complete and accurate integrated records from diverse and sometimes conflicting sources. We term this challenge the truth finding problem. We observe that some sources are ge...