Reasoning about trust and aboutness in the context of communication

摘要

Trust may have many different informal definitions. In this work, formal definitions are proposed in Modal Logic in order to have clear rules for reasoning about trust. We start from trust in some properties of an information source, like sincerity, competence or vigilance, about a given proposition. Then, this definition is extended to trust about all the propositions which are about a given topic (for instance, the topic mathematical logic or the topic painting). A further extension is about all the propositions which inform about a given individual (for instance the individual Luis Farinas or the individual Toledo). Specific logics are presented for reasoning about the fact that a given proposition is about a given topic and for reasoning about the fact that a proposition informs about a given individual. At the end, we give a brief extension to qualitative graded trust.