Identity and an Extended Situation Theory
Janelle Mason, Keith Coleman, Albert Esterline · 2022
We focus on identity as an equivalence relation (supporting Leibniz's Law and the Principle of Substitution) and how identity hypotheses are addressed and supported in law enforcement. The dominate notion of identify in computer science is of something like a profile; identifying in our terms can have such a profile as one side of an identity as long as it is interpreted as denoting. Our examples are from law enforcement, but we intend our framework to apply generally to identifying people. We use a modified version of Barwise and Perry's situation theory to capture how evidence accrues to identity hypotheses. We extend the relational theory of meaning of situation semantics to encompass an extended version of the causal theory of reference that regards traces of a person (e.g., fingerprints) and their copies as devices denoting that person. These objects stitch together the situations relevant to an investigation. We extend situation theory with higher-order elements motivated by our analysis of criminal investigations, event statements, and thematic relations taken from sentential semantics. We present a hypothetical criminal scenario (which we have presented in focus groups) and show how we encode it into RDF in terms of our ontologies.