A Logic for Veracity

TL;DR

The paper tackles formalising veracity, a notion encompassing authenticity, truth, trust, and demonstrability, without recourse to external authorities or an absolute reality. It advocates an intuitionistic logic as the foundation to preserve information and introduces a witness-based semantics where a veracity claim $A$ is upheld by a witness $a$ with the judgement $a \in A$. It compares this approach to other assurance methods like distributed ledger technologies, arguing for a provenance- and evidence-centered framework. The work lays groundwork for a formal system that handles atomic and non-atomic veracity and defines constructs such as $\\bot$ to represent unverifiable claims, enabling initial proof rules and a structured judgement language.

Abstract

This paper shows the initial stages of development, from first principles, of a formal logic to characterise and then explore issues in a broadly defined idea of Veracity, which includes properties of demonstrability, truth, trust and authenticity.