Against Truth

Simon Brooke

Hey, what IS truth, man? [Beeblebrox, quoted in [Adams, 1978]]

This title is, of course, a respectful nod to Feyerabend’s Against Method

Introduction

This document is in two parts: a statement of a problem, and an account of an attempt to address it. The problem is stated briefly in the first chapter, and fleshed out in the following two with a history of attempts which have been made in the past to address it, and an analysis of what would be needed to solve it.

The second part starts with an account of a system built by the author in collaboration with Peter Mott, describing particularly how the problem was addressed by this system; subsequent chapters will describe the development of a further system, in which the analysis developed in the first section will be applied.

This document deals only with explanation. Issues relating to inference and especially to truth maintenance will undoubtedly be raised as it progresses, but such hares will resolutely not be followed.

Note on the quality of the text

Much of this text was written between 1986 and 1988 on Xerox 1108 and 1186 workstations, in their native WYSIWYG document system, and printed as hard copy; and some was written on the very first generation of Apple Macintosh computer, and again printed as hard copy. The text here is the consequence of scanning the hard copy and running optical character recognition on the scans. It isn’t perfect. I am proof reading as I go and I hope that it will improve.

Contents

Frontmatter

1. Manifesto

Part one: Stating the problem

1. The Problem
2. History
3. Analysis

Part Two: Into the wild wood

1. Arboretum
2. Conception
3. Reimagining
4. Implementing
5. Experience

Endmatter

1. Errata

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Adams, 1978