What is seereason.com?
- A Logic Assistant - a tool for extracting and storing the logical assertions that underly ideas and documents, and for storing your beliefs about those assertions,
- A Theorem Prover - assertions are passed to an automatic theorem prover to find any logical contradictions,
- A Logic Network - a site where you can integrate your analyses and beliefs into those of the SeeReason community.
Getting Started
To gain access to the system all you need is a free login, or use one of the many authentication methods we provide such as Google or Facebook. This allows you to see the contents of the database and to add your own.
Explore!
The first thing to do is explore. Click on Documents to see some of the documents that have been analyzed, or click on Search to search for documents and subjects relating to a word. Near the document you will see a list of related assertions, logical statements that representing the perceived intent of the document author. You will also see a list of related subjects, which may lead to other documents on similar topics. You may also see Theorems, which are lists of assertions which end with an assertion that the system was able to prove to be a logical consequence of the ones preceding it.
Opine!
Next, you might want to put your own beliefs into the system. Beside each assertion is a dropdown "ballot box", which you can use to signal whether you think an assertion is always true or always false. You can also reset it to its initial state, that you have no opinion Note that if you mark an assertion as always false and the system may infer your beliefs about other assertions, and may even discover that there is a logical inconsistency between your beliefs about two assertions.
You can also customize the definitions of the subjects of related to the document. A subject is a unique identifier with which a set of descriptions have been associated, the intention being for those descriptions to make understood what real world thing the subject is meant to refer to. You can choose to accept or reject each description in the same way you accept or reject the other assertions. You can also indicate that you belief two subjects to refer to the exact same thing, and once you do the two subjects will appear as one, and all the logic concerning one will also be applied to the other.
Analyze!
Finally, you can enter your own documents and perform your own logical analysis. [...]
Glossary
- Arity - The number of arguments that a Predicate takes. For example, the color "green" is an arity one predicate, while numerical less than is an arity 2 predicate. Because each subject corresponds to a predicate, each subject has an arity. The set corresponding to an arity 2 subject is a set of ordered pairs.
- Assertion - any logical formula
- Belief Assertion - any logic formula of the form "I believe A99". Here the "I" refers to the belief assertion's author. If a belief assertion about A99 exists, the user is said to accept A99. The user can create more than one belief assertion about A99, these are arranged in order of creation and the newest one is considered to be the user's current belief.
- Propositional Logic - a simple type of logic which underlies the first order logic used by SeeReason.
- Document - a block of text which has been imported into SeeReason and assigned a document number. Documents are referenced using the prefix 'D'.
- Element - anything that can be a member of a set, which is to say, absolutely anything at all.
- First Order Logic - the type of logic implemented by SeeReason, first order logic adds variables, quantification, and functions to the Propositional logic.
- Ontology - the problem of assigning names. In logical formulas we typically use the letters x, y, z, a, b, c to represent the basic elements we are reasoning about, but in the SeeReason system we need a way to store and represent how these elements correspond with the things in the real world that the documents we are analyzing are about. To complicate matters, there is a lot of disagreement amongst people about what real world objects is being referenced by a given piece of language.
- Predicate - a rule which defines a Set. The rule tells us whether a given thing is in the set or not in the set.
- Proof - An assertion as considered proven if there are no conditions under which it can be shown to be false. Such an assertion will appear as green text. Note that whether an assertion is proven is computed in relation to the user's beliefs - the premises which contribute to the proof must all be any nontrivial example of proof will involve several other assertions which the user Believes
- Set - any collection of elements. A predicate is used to determine which elements are in the set and which are not.
- Subject - In SeeReason a Subject is a way of defining a set by describing it. The subject itself is represented as a number with the prefix 'S', and descriptions are associated with it by adding Subject Assertions of the form "All S99 are (descriptive text)".
- Theorem - a series of Assertions which typically end with a proven assertion.
- User - Someone with a SeeReason account. Users are sometimes referenced by number with the prefix 'U'.