I examine the difficulties that several philosophers of language are liable to encounter in their attempts to provide an account of the connection between truth and assertion. I then attempt to provide an account of this connection. The analysis is concerned chiefly with difficulties which consist in elucidating the conceptual connection between truth and assertion in a way that respects certain linguistic intuitions while at the same time rendering the concept of truth amenable to a semantic interpretation. The proposed view suggests one way in which we might go about meeting the theoretical demands implicit in addressing this concern, among others, demonstrating the extent to which a theory of truth should be regarded as belonging to the province of epistemology. Insofar as semantical considerations figure into such a theory, a more systematic investigation of the interface between epistemology and natural language semantics is recommended. The solution to many problems at this interface, I argue, lay in an analysis of judgment.

Yiwen Zhan defends a new account of the pragmatics of assertion, according to which assertions are agents’ performative speech acts of commitment to truth. He explains how such a pragmatic approach can be fitted into Fregean context and account for the force–content relation, non-assertoric contents, context-sensitivity, constitutive norms, belief and the dynamics in discourse, and other related problems.

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More and more companies are working toward digitizing their workflow and this has increased the necessity of digital signatures.An important part of digital signatures is the authentication process which is heavily regulated for Swedish government agencies by DIGG, DIGG only allows the use of Security Assertion Mark-up Language(SAML) for authentication but are looking into also allowing OpenID Connect(OIDC) and together with Swedish OIDC working group produce a specification.This thesis is looking into this preliminary specification and exploring if OIDC can do everything that SAML can do in regards of digital signatures, and if the inclusion of OIDC would render SAML obsolete.This is explored by implementing OIDC in twoday's services that follow DIGG's specifications to see if there are needs that OpenID Connect cannot meet.From the restriction in the thesis there was nothing that SAML could do that OIDC could not do, On the contrary their are features in OIDC that SAML could not match.The inclussion of OIDC would not make SAML obsolete unless customers use-cases evolve to include the features that SAML could not match.

La construction identitaire du sujet relève du vaste champ sémantique de l'identité en général, et de l'identité personnelle en particulier. A l'heure de la modernité, c'est- à- dire de l'affirmation du sujet, le sens et la valeur du processus identitaire interrogent de manière transversale les sciences humaines et sociales. En littérature francophone, la construction identitaire du sujet romanesque africain, se complique des rémanences d'un environnement référentiel également en mutation socio- culturelle, A partir du corpus de quatre romans des auteurs gabonais Angèle Rawiri et, Jean Divassa Nyama, la présente étude s'intéresse au processus identitaire d'un sujet à la fois urbain et rural, qui en dépit de plusieurs stratégies développées, vérifie par son échec la thèse du « héros » problématique.Au regard des implications formelles, psycho- sociologiques et culturelles de notre objet d'étude, nous avons retenu une approche anthropologique, à savoir plurielle, pour mieux en cerner les nombreux contours.La première partie, descriptive, dresse le contexte socio- culturel auxquels s'alimentent les facteurs exogènes et endogènes de la crise identitaire du personnage. Celle – ci naît surtout du désir d'une nouvelle identification du personnage par rapport à soi et à son milieu, sous la pression d'une modernité exigeante. La diversité des situations du sujet débouche sur une stratégie d'affirmation identitaire multiforme, où dominent à la fois le goùt du pouvoir, le besoin de sécurité affective et l'enjeu culturel.Le deuxième axe voit le personnage- sujet lancer sa dynamique de quête, selon une configuration narrative et actantielle, articulée par une stratégie déterminante de modalités cognitives et pratiques.La dernière partie place le paradigme spatial au centre de la sémantique de la construction identitaire du sujet: cela débute par le cadre spatio- temporel africain en tant que structurant extérieur de l'aventure, auxquels s'ajoutent une intériorité et un imaginaire investis à la fois d'une valeur fonctionnelle et d'une forte symbolique. Enfin, l'importance accordé par le sujet au jeu relationnel sur son parcours identitaire contribue à notre sens à signifier l'importance de sa transformation intérieure. Il ressort en conséquence que l'émergence du sujet africain passe par l'enrichissement de son Être, à travers une vraie connaissance de soi et de ses valeurs culturelles, pour mieux exister au monde. / The identity shaping of the romantic subject owes to a large semantic field of identity in general, and of personal identity in particular. At the time of modernity, and more precisely, of the assertion of the subject, the sense and value of the identity process imply transversal clarification with the help of social and human sciences. As far as francophone African literature is concerned, the identity shaping of the romantic subject in the novel is facing the persistences of a referential environment which is submitted to sociocultural mutation.Applied to a corpus of four novels written by two gabonese authors, Angele Rawiri and Jean Divassa Nyama, the current study concerns the identity process of the romantic subject who is sharing rural as well as urban environment, and who, despite several strategies at stake, responds though his failure, to the concept of the problematic “hero”.Consequently, the emerging process of the African subject depends on the improvement of his being, through a real knowledge of himself and his cultural values. That is the best way for him to assert his existence in the world

Forty-nine Cache Valley residents, between the ages of 18 and 45, who volunteered to participate in an assertion training class were assigned to one of seven groups. Subjects were administered pre- and posttests and a two month follow-up evaluation. Measures included Rotter's Internal-External Locus of Control Scale, the Rathus Assertive Scale, and the Berger Self-Acceptance Scale. The results obtained indicate that self-acceptance and assertiveness changed as a result of assertion training and that these changes were maintained at follow-up. No difference between internals and externals was observed as a result of semi-structured assertion training.

The general goal of this dissertation is to highlight the role of discourse pragmatics in the explanation of the use of the indicative and subjunctive moods in Spanish sentential complements. This dissertation examines mood selection in Spanish complements in order to illustrate the shortcomings of the traditional semantic/syntactic approach (Terrell & Hooper (1974), Hooper (1975), P. Klein (1974), Fukushima (1978-79), Bell (1980), and Takagaki (1984)) and to provide within the Information Structure framework (Lambrecht 1994; 2001) a detailed analysis of mood selection in Spanish complement clauses. Considering some existing pragmatic approaches to Spanish mood selection (e.g., Lavandera 1983, Guitart 1991, Mejías-Bikandi 1994, 1998), they are found to be inadequate because they are based on decontextualized sentences. This dissertation considers the context where sentences take place and contributes to our understanding of mood selection in Spanish complements as a formal reflection of the pragmatic properties and relations of the discourse referents that are denoted by noun complements, considering pragmatic notions of presupposition and assertion of propositional referents, their activation, and the pragmatic relations of topic/focus of these referents in the utterances. The notion of pragmatic assertion used in this dissertation is based on the notion of speaker intent, and it is equated with the notion of inactive discourse referents, which are in turn linked to the use of indicative mood in complements of assertive matrices. The notion of pragmatic presupposition is equated with the notion of active referents in the discourse, which are in turn linked to the use of subjunctive mood in complements of doubt/negation and comment matrices. However, this thesis argues that not all uses of subjunctive are motivated by the active status of propositional referents. Volitional and possibility uses of subjunctive are analyzed, similarly to assertive matrices, as activating a discourse referent. Yet, contrary to assertive matrices, and following Fauconnier’s (1985) theory of mental spaces, the referent activated belongs to the domain that represents an individual’s view of reality. This account of mood distribution in complement clauses is eventually extended to adjectival and adverbial subordinates and provides an explanation of mood distribution in all subordinate contexts in Spanish. / text

Many information sources can be viewed as collections of objects and descriptions about objects. The relationship between objects is often characterized by a set of constraints that semantically encode background knowledge of some domain. The most straightforward and fundamental way to access information in these repositories is to search for objects that satisfy certain selection criteria. This work considers a description logics (DL) based representation of such information sources and object queries, which allows for automated reasoning over the constraints accompanying objects. Formally, a knowledge base K=(T, A) captures constraints in the terminology (a TBox) T, and objects with their descriptions in the assertions (an ABox) A, using some DL dialect L. In such a setting, object descriptions are L-concepts and object identifiers correspond to individual names occurring in K. Correspondingly, object queries are the well known problem of instance retrieval in the underlying DL knowledge base K, which returns the identifiers of qualifying objects. This work generalizes instance retrieval over knowledge bases to provide users with answers in which both identifiers and descriptions of qualifying objects are given. The proposed query paradigm, called assertion retrieval, is favoured over instance retrieval since it provides more informative answers to users. A more compelling reason is related to performance: assertion retrieval enables a transfer of basic relational database techniques, such as caching and query rewriting, in the context of an assertion retrieval algebra. The main contributions of this work are two-fold: one concerns optimizing the fundamental reasoning task that underlies assertion retrieval, namely, instance checking, and the other establishes a query compilation framework based on the assertion retrieval algebra. The former is necessary because an assertion retrieval query can entail a large volume of instance checking requests in the form of K|= a:C, where "a" is an individual name and "C" is a L-concept. This work thus proposes a novel absorption technique, ABox absorption, to improve instance checking. ABox absorption handles knowledge bases that have an expressive underlying dialect L, for instance, that requires disjunctive knowledge. It works particularly well when knowledge bases contain a large number of concrete domain concepts for object descriptions. This work further presents a query compilation framework based on the assertion retrieval algebra to make assertion retrieval more practical. In the framework, a suite of rewriting rules is provided to generate a variety of query plans, with a focus on plans that avoid reasoning w.r.t. the background knowledge bases when sufficient cached results of earlier requests exist. ABox absorption and the query compilation framework have been implemented in a prototypical system, dubbed CARE Assertion Retrieval Engine (CARE). CARE also defines a simple yet effective cost model to search for the best plan generated by query rewriting. Empirical studies of CARE have shown that the proposed techniques in this work make assertion retrieval a practical application over a variety of domains.

Many information sources can be viewed as collections of objects and descriptions about objects. The relationship between objects is often characterized by a set of constraints that semantically encode background knowledge of some domain. The most straightforward and fundamental way to access information in these repositories is to search for objects that satisfy certain selection criteria. This work considers a description logics (DL) based representation of such information sources and object queries, which allows for automated reasoning over the constraints accompanying objects. Formally, a knowledge base K=(T, A) captures constraints in the terminology (a TBox) T, and objects with their descriptions in the assertions (an ABox) A, using some DL dialect L. In such a setting, object descriptions are L-concepts and object identifiers correspond to individual names occurring in K. Correspondingly, object queries are the well known problem of instance retrieval in the underlying DL knowledge base K, which returns the identifiers of qualifying objects. This work generalizes instance retrieval over knowledge bases to provide users with answers in which both identifiers and descriptions of qualifying objects are given. The proposed query paradigm, called assertion retrieval, is favoured over instance retrieval since it provides more informative answers to users. A more compelling reason is related to performance: assertion retrieval enables a transfer of basic relational database techniques, such as caching and query rewriting, in the context of an assertion retrieval algebra. The main contributions of this work are two-fold: one concerns optimizing the fundamental reasoning task that underlies assertion retrieval, namely, instance checking, and the other establishes a query compilation framework based on the assertion retrieval algebra. The former is necessary because an assertion retrieval query can entail a large volume of instance checking requests in the form of K|= a:C, where "a" is an individual name and "C" is a L-concept. This work thus proposes a novel absorption technique, ABox absorption, to improve instance checking. ABox absorption handles knowledge bases that have an expressive underlying dialect L, for instance, that requires disjunctive knowledge. It works particularly well when knowledge bases contain a large number of concrete domain concepts for object descriptions. This work further presents a query compilation framework based on the assertion retrieval algebra to make assertion retrieval more practical. In the framework, a suite of rewriting rules is provided to generate a variety of query plans, with a focus on plans that avoid reasoning w.r.t. the background knowledge bases when sufficient cached results of earlier requests exist. ABox absorption and the query compilation framework have been implemented in a prototypical system, dubbed CARE Assertion Retrieval Engine (CARE). CARE also defines a simple yet effective cost model to search for the best plan generated by query rewriting. Empirical studies of CARE have shown that the proposed techniques in this work make assertion retrieval a practical application over a variety of domains.