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Truth

Let us introduce some language to talk about truth. Consider a fact "Joe Smith lives in New York." from an Ampersand perspective. In Ampersand, we can analyse this as follows:

  • Let Person and City be concepts****
  • Let "Joe Smith" be an atom of the concept Person and "New York" an atom of the concept City.
  • Let us use the relation livesIn[Person*City] to contain our fact.
  • livesIn is the relation name and [Person*City] is the signature of this relation.
  • Person is the source of this relation and City is the target.
  • If the pair ("Joe Smith","New York") is an element of this relation, Ampersand considers the statement "Joe Smith" livesIn "New York" to be true. So all pairs in a relation represent facts, i.e. true statements.

Language that makes sense to the business​

Ampersand takes a pragmatic stance on truth: You model only things that make sense to the business. This video clip illustrates the distinction between sensible and senseless statements. A sensible statement (we say: "It makes sense.") is a statement that can be true or false. Sentences that are not sensible (we can say: it is non-sense) are to be avoided. The Ampersand type system helps you to make sensible statements only.

Truth in context​

Truth always has context. If we say "Jack was married to Jackie", this statement is true in a context where "Jack" refers to the 35th president of the United States, John F. Kennedy. However, this statement is not true in a context where there is no Jack. And in a context where marriage doesn't exist, this statement makes no sense.