On the truthmaker view of ontological commitment [Heil (From an ontological point of view, 2003); Armstrong (Truth and truthmakers, 2004); Cameron (Philosophical Studies, 2008)], a theory is committed to the entities needed in the world for the theory to be made true. I argue that this view puts truthmaking to the wrong task. None of the leading accounts of truthmaking—via necessitation, superv...

Patricia L. Davies, PhD, OTR, FAOTA, is Associate Professor, Colorado State University, Fort Collins. Sometimes a normal problem . . . resists [solving,] revealing anomalies (problems). . . then begins the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science: a scientific revolution . . . tradition-shattering complime...

In this article, we present the web of commitment methodology that allows us to specify the dialogical behavior of agents from the commitments that can be contracted between them and from the links that can exist between those commitments. At first, we present the DIAGAL agent communication language which is based on social commitments and dialogue games that are defined as structures regulatin...

Selective opening attacks against commitment schemes occur when the commitment scheme is repeated in parallel (or concurrently) and an adversary can choose depending on the commit-phase transcript to see the values and openings to some subset of the committed bits. Commitments are secure under such attacks if one can prove that the remaining, unopened commitments stay secret. We prove the follo...

Social commitments provide a powerful representation for modeling multi-agent interactions without relinquishing part of agents autonomy and flexibility. However, distinguishing between different but related types of conditional commitments, a natural frame of social commitments, is not considered yet. In this paper, we define a new logical language, CTL, which extends CTL with modalities to re...

We introduce the notion of hybrid trapdoor commitment schemes. Intuitively a hybrid trapdoor commitment scheme is a primitive which can be either an unconditionally binding commitment scheme or a trapdoor commitment scheme depending on the distribution of commitment parameters. Moreover, such two possible distributions are computationally indistinguishable. Hybrid trapdoor commitments are relat...

Selective opening attacks against commitment schemes occur when the commitment scheme is repeated in parallel and an adversary can choose depending on the commit-phase transcript to see the values and openings to some subset of the committed bits. Commitments are secure under such attacks if one can prove that the remaining, unopened commitments stay secret. We prove the following black-box con...