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Inconsistent knowledge as a natural phenomenon: the ranking of reasonable inferences as a computational approach to naturally inconsistent (legal) theories. (English) Zbl 1242.68305

Dodig-Crnkovic, Gordana (ed.) et al., Information and computation. Essays on scientific and philosophical understanding of foundations of information and computation. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific (ISBN 978-981-4295-47-5/hbk; 978-981-4295-48-2/ebook). World Scientific Series in Information Studies 2, 439-476 (2011).
Summary: The perspective-bound character of information and information processing gives rise to natural inconsistency. Natural inconsistency poses a problem if a common perspective is needed, for example when a shared (consistent) decision has to be made (by humans, within logics or by computers). There are three main approaches to solving the problem of common perspective: universalism; utilitarianism; and contractarianism. However, none of these approaches has ever been made computationally tractable. Inconsistency as a natural phenomenon explains why this can never be achieved. The core of the problem is that natural inconsistency not only exists at the level of perspectives on the actual situation, but it also exists at the level of the principles used to decide on a common perspective. There is no universal preferential ordering of perspectives at either level because there is no known, let alone universally recognized, universal processor. Furthermore, there is no exhaustive or non-contradictory set of universal or utilitarian principles or contracts available. An analysis of the solution to the problem of common perspective found in the legal domain can probably be extended to solve this problem in other domains. In this chapter, we recapitulate the logic of reasonable inferences, which formalizes the reduction of all actual legal perspectives in a case to all formally valid legal perspectives. Subsequently, we make an inventory of commonly used tentative legal decision principles and categorize them into three classes. The properties of the three classes are then used to define the semantics of meta-predicates, which can be used to rank the remaining perspectives computationally. Finally, we illustrate the behavior of the logic of reasonable inferences in combination with the meta-predicates by means of an elaborate legal example.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1221.00068].

MSC:

68T27 Logic in artificial intelligence
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