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The Semantics of Untrustworthiness

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Abstract

We offer a formal treatment of the semantics of both complete and incomplete mistrustful or distrustful information transmissions. The semantics of such relations is analysed in view of rules that define the behaviour of a receiving agent. We justify this approach in view of human agent communications and secure system design. We further specify some properties of such relations.

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Notes

  1. For a genealogical overview of the notion see Simpson (2012).

  2. See also the large list of references about trust in labour organizations available at http://www.ilocarib.org.tt/Promalco_tool/productivity-tools/manual07/m7_12.htm.

  3. Notice that while in the following we will be speaking of the actual information transmission from Bob to Alice, the definition of trust as second order relation does not in fact require the first order relation to be actualized: one could perfectly well consider a property instead of a relation— like (GoodMathematician B ) and a second-order property trust A (GoodMathematician B ), which would actualize in any relation trust A (TheoremTransmission B ).

  4. It is here important to stress how this notion does not coincide with that of reliance, where one terminal relies on the other to perform some action without it knowing it or not.

  5. In the following examples, we will use italic fonts when referring to human agents, and typewriter fonts when referring to mechanical principals.

  6. See Floridi (2011).

  7. In computer security, a principal is an entity that can be authenticated in information transactions.

  8. Such a schema \(\langle{\tt Metadata},\mathcal{G}\rangle\) seems particularly apt to enrich the dynamics of design of online scientific databases so as to facilitate the selection of appropriate datasets specific to the purposes of given users. For an analysis of the epistemological issues related to this problem and the connected notion of distributed understanding, see e.g. Leonelli (2014).

  9. The processing of metadata depends on its typology: for \({\tt procedure}\) it will be execution; for \({\tt source}\) it will be reachability; for \({\tt tags}\) it will be checking; for \({\tt user}\) it will be targeting.

  10. As an example, consider the pair \(\langle {\tt geotags}, \mathcal{PWD}\rangle\) for identification on access requests, where geolocalization is superfluous, while \({\tt procedure}\) or \({\tt source}\) would be appropriate.

  11. Converse cases of transmissions including metadata but no goal are also possible to formulate. An example would be a set of building instructions, or deductive steps, that miss a declaration of the building task or the theorem: \(\langle {\tt procedure:R1, R2, \dots}, \mathcal{G}\_{\tt empty}\rangle\).

  12. The present definition of untrustworthy transmission implies that mistrust and distrust cannot be defined in absence of communication. In other words, one can judge a source untrustworthy only with respect to a given information transmission. This is an immediate consequence of defining trust as a second order property of first order relations. Nothing, however, prevents from extending this framework in view of memory-based agents who are able to assess trustworthiness of peers in view of previous communications. Notice, however, that even in the present treatment, the notion of (un)trust is not content-bounded, i.e. the formal treatment is not strictly dependent on tokens of information: the definition uses a data/metadata structure such that the assessment of untrustworthiness can be induced only by evaluation of the sender’s properties.

  13. For a complete analysis of a theory of strongly semantic information, see Floridi (2011). According to such theory, information cannot be properly false. The problem of the veridicality of information content has been long debated and it is not a settled theoretical issue. For the present purposes, we shall not enter this debate and suffice to say that, in the following, we understand ‘false information’ as tantamount to false data with meaning. For the introduction of the notion of (un)intentionally false information see also Floridi (2011, p. 260).

  14. In fact, we can think of an unintentional transmission of intentionally false information (e.g. the wrongful selection of a REPLY-ALL method in an email communication to transmit a consciously formulated excuse to miss a meeting), as well as an intentional transmission of unintentionally false information (e.g. the correctly addressed email to my boss, where I claim I will be missing the meeting this Friday because of a research workshop in Germany, while I meant in the UK).

  15. See Jespersen and Primiero (2013), also for a brief overview of the literature in formal semantics of modal modifiers.

  16. The characteristic behaviour of a modal modification operation is precisely that of oscillating between a subsective relation and a privative one: an ‘alleged assassin’ is an assassin (hence subsecting on the set of assassins by inducing one that is also suspected to be one) or is not (hence inducing the privative case).

  17. See Primiero and Jespersen (2010), also for a brief overview of the literature in formal semantics for privative modifiers.

  18. Notice that this means that a standard upwards monotonic intuitionistic semantics would, for example, not be feasible for this purpose. This is the reason why the model for trust introduced in Primiero and Taddeo (2012), though intuitively based on a verificationist semantics, extends the standard setting with a weak truth predicate based on missing refutations. A full calculus for the latter is given in Primiero (2012).

  19. Notice how this is the case for our treatment of trust as a second-order property characterizing first-order relations of information transmission on specified contents. Trust defined as first-order relation requires a restriction on transitivity, what is called in the literature promiscuous trust.

  20. In what follows we abbreviate Metadata with simply M for simplicity of reading.

  21. In the following, we will be using two obvious simplifications: that no double-games are in place, and that the untrustworthiness assessments are public.

  22. A more powerful framework allowing us to express the reasons for untrust assessments, would make it possible to formulate the reactions of i to j’s response to the initial message. In this way, i’s further assessment could be dictated on the basis of the correctness of j’s one. We leave this to further research.

  23. Other, even more optimistic social epistemological attempts to deal with the problem of adjudicating between rival experts are due to Goldman (2001) and Haack (2004). However as suggested by Miller (forthcoming), they do not significantly enhance the layperson’s epistemic arsenal.

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Acknowledgments

The first author wishes to thank the participants to the Fifth Workshop on the Philosophy of Information held at the University of Hertfordshire where this paper was first presented, for useful comments and discussions. The second author wishes to thank Jan de Winter for comments on previous versions of the paper. Both authors would like to thank the reviewers for their comments that helped improve the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Middlesex University, London, UK

    Giuseppe Primiero

  2. Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

    Laszlo Kosolosky

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  1. Giuseppe Primiero
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  2. Laszlo Kosolosky
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Correspondence to Giuseppe Primiero.

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Primiero, G., Kosolosky, L. The Semantics of Untrustworthiness. Topoi 35, 253–266 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9227-2

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