How to act on inconsistent news: Ignore, resolve, or reject

摘要

Inconsistencies frequently occur in news about the real-world. Some of these inconsistencies may be more significant than others, and some news may contain more inconsistencies than others. This creates problems of deciding whether to act on these inconsistencies, and if so how. Possible actions on an inconsistency in a news report include ignore the inconsistency, resolve the inconsistency, and reject the report. To support this, we extend and apply a general characterization of inconsistency, based on Belnap’s four-valued logic. For conflicts arising between the news and background knowledge, we analyse coherence and significance of the corresponding the four-valued models for that knowledge and show how this analysis can indicate an appropriate course of action.