The first issue of _Artificial Intelligence and Law_ journal was published in 1992. This paper discusses several topics that relate more naturally to groups of papers than a single paper published in the journal: ontologies, reasoning about evidence, the various contributions of Douglas Walton, and the practical application of the techniques of AI and Law.

Despite increasing interest in studying arguments from deontic authority of the general form “(1) \(\delta\) is a deontic authority in institution \(\varOmega\) ; (2) according to \(\delta\), I should do \(\alpha\), _C_: therefore, (3) I should do \(\alpha\) ”, the state of the art models are not capable of grasping their complexity. The existing sets of critical questions assigned to this argumentation scheme seem to conflate two problems: whether a person is subject to an authority of an institution in the (...) first place and whether the command issued within the context of a particular institution is eventually binding. For this reason, we introduce (1) a set of Basic Critical Questions to scrutinize the former issue, and (2) a set of more detailed questions related to specific features, also referred to as “parameters”, of institutional environments (Intra-Institutional Critical Questions). We identify major elements of institutional environments in which authoritative utterances are made and the crucial parameters of arguments from deontic authority. The selected evidence from the decisions of the Polish Supreme Administrative Court helps us show how these parameters may be used to reconstruct subtypes of this argument scheme, with their associated sets of critical questions. In specific institutional contexts, such detailed schemes are capable of grasping the complexity of appeals to deontic authority and thus should be used rather than general schemes. The reconstruction of argumentation schemes with critical questions shows how particular arguments may successfully be attacked. (shrink)

Recent contributions to the philosophy of manipulation have challenged assumptions explicitly understood as “Kantian”; especially the assumption that the concept and the negative value of manipulation could be explained by regarding it as a subversion of rational agency. This paper examines Robert Noggle’s concerns about Kantian accounts of manipulation and confronts them with Kant’s considerations about the “moral illusion”. It argues that, while the original framework of transcendental idealism makes it hard to understand the value and vulnerability of rational agency, (...) an appropriately revised Kantian perspective on rational agency and manipulation may still be promising. It would also overcome the limitations of Noggle’s own account of manipulation that result from a kind of methodological subjectivism. The considerations suggest that a multidimensional model is needed to fully account for the normative status and value(s) of (the different facets of) autonomy. (shrink)

This is a report on the Doctoral Consortium co-located with the 17th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law in Montreal.

This book presents the current state of the art regarding the application of logical tools to the problems of theory and practice of lawmaking. It shows how contemporary logic may be useful in the analysis of legislation, legislative drafting and legal reasoning concerning different contexts of lawmaking. Elaborations of the process of lawmaking have variously emphasised its political, social or economic aspects. Yet despite strong interest in logical analyses of law, questions remains about the role of logical tools in lawmaking. (...) This volume attempts to bridge that gap, or at least to narrow it, drawing together some important research problems-and some possible solutions-as seen through the work of leading contemporary academics. The volume encompasses 20 chapters written by authors from 16 countries and it presents diversified views on the understanding of logic (from strict mathematical approaches to the informal, argumentative ones) and differentiated choices concerning the aspects of lawmaking taken into account. The book presents a broad set of perspectives, insights and results into the emerging field of research devoted to the logical analysis of the area of creation of law. How does logic inform lawmaking? Are legal systems consistent and complete? How can legal rules be represented by means of formal calculi and visualization techniques? Does the structure of statutes or of legal systems resemble the structure of deductive systems? What are the logical relations between the basic concepts of jurisprudence that constitute the system of law? How are theories of legal interpretation relevant to the process of legislation? How might the statutory text be analysed by means of contemporary computer programs? These and other questions, ranging from the theoretical to the immediately practical, are addressed in this definitive collection. (shrink)

Social researchers have extensively addressed the immigration of one million Russian speakers to Israel/palestine over the past twenty-five years. However, the immigrants’ incorporation into the Israeli occupation regime and the ongoing colonisation of Palestine have rarely been questioned as such. In the interviews informing this article, Russian-speaking immigrant women living in Arab-Palestinian communities discuss their complex relations with Palestinian, Jewish-Israeli and Russian-Israeli communities. Sharing a background with Russian-speaking Jewish Israelis on the one hand, and marital kinship ties to Palestinians on (...) the other, these women encounter multiple boundaries of territory and identity in their everyday lives. Drawing on feminist border thinking, I explore these encounters as a navigation through geopolitical and epistemic borderlands in a dense colonial reality. I am particularly interested in the potential of such an exploration to question essentialism and destabilise binary ethno-national categories of identity, such as Arab/jew and Israeli/palestinian, that dominate not only hegemonic but also emancipatory discourses. These binary divisions are not a straightforward outcome of political regimes but rather the result of ongoing border-making processes, which are vulnerable to disorder and disruption. This perspective aims to enrich understandings of the roles that gendered ethno-national identities play in sustaining the colonial relations of power in Israel/palestine. (shrink)

Priest and others have presented their “most telling” argument for paraconsistent logic: that only paraconsistent logics allow non-trivial inconsistent theories. This is a very prevalent argument; occurring as it does in the work of many relevant and more generally paraconsistent logicians. However this argument can be shown to be unsuccessful. There is a crucial ambiguity in the notion of non-triviality. Disambiguated the most telling reason for paraconsistent logics is either question-begging or mistaken. This highlights an important confusion about the role (...) of logic in our development of our theories of the world. Does logic chart good reasoning or our commitments? We also consider another abductive argument for paraconsistent logics which also is shown to fail. (shrink)

The article examines the extent to which the scope for social design of responsibility regimes is limited by pre-positive boundaries. A distinction is made between purely performative, purely constitutive and normative attributions of responsibility. It is argued that statements about pre-positive responsibilities in a broad area are only possible depending on specific normative-ethical theories. Nevertheless, the article attempts to defend both an outer limit of possible attributions of responsibility and a minimum content of any plausible ethics of responsibility. The outer (...) limit is characterised by the principle 'ultra posse nemo obligatur', the minimum content results from a reflection on the general normative preconditions of each specific attribution of responsibility. This reflection also allows for some tentative considerations regarding the interpretation of processes of transnationalisation. (shrink)

Hatte Jeremy Bentham den von ihm geprägten Begriff deontology in seinem gleichnamigen Werk noch im etymologisch buchstäblichen Sinne als »Lehre vom Sollen« verstanden und mit der »Wissenschaft von der Moral« gleichgesetzt, so dient das Adjektiv ›deontologisch‹ heutzutage ausschließlich der Kategorisierung einer spezifischen Teilklasse allgemeiner Konzeptionen normativer Ethik. ›Deontologische‹ Theorien normativer Ethik werden dann in der Regel ›teleologischen‹ Theorien, und/oder ›konsequentialistischen‹ Theorien gegenübergestellt.

This paper argues that certain transcendental arguments can play a valuable role in moral reasoning: They can make explicit constitutive elements of our common practice of justifying our actions to one another, of addressing practical criticism, of deliberating together, or of constructing a sharable standpoint of practical judgment. Thereby, they can serve to reaffirm basic normative commitments that no one who makes practical claims or who complains against another person’s conduct can avoid making. This amounts to a more modest interpretation (...) of the potential of transcendental arguments than can be usually found in more traditional (“first personal”) versions of Kantian constitutivism. However, the modest use of transcendental reasoning may suffice for all practical purposes, even though it is not designed to force a moral sceptic into endorsing moral principles. (shrink)

The book introduces a conception of discourse ethics, an intersubjectivist version of Kantian ethics. Analysing contributions by Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, Wolfgang Kuhlmann, Albrecht Wellmer, Robert Alexy, Klaus Günther, Rainer Forst, Marcel Niquet and others, it reconstructs critical discussions of the justification of the principle of morality (Part I) and the various proposals for its application (Part II). It defends an alternative model of how discourse ethics can provide guidance in non-ideal circumstances and avoid both arbitrariness and rigorism.

Speakers’ perception of a visual scene influences the language they use to describe it—which objects they choose to mention and how they characterize the relationships between them. We show that visual complexity can either delay or facilitate description generation, depending on how much disambiguating information is required and how useful the scene's complexity can be in providing, for example, helpful landmarks. To do so, we measure speech onset times, eye gaze, and utterance content in a reference production experiment in which (...) the target object is either unique or non-unique in a visual scene of varying size and complexity. Speakers delay speech onset if the target object is non-unique and requires disambiguation, and we argue that this reflects the cost of deciding on a high-level strategy for describing it. The eye-tracking data demonstrate that these delays increase when speakers are able to conduct an extensive early visual search, implying that when speakers scan too little of the scene early on, they may decide to begin speaking before becoming aware that their description is underspecified. Speakers’ content choices reflect the visual makeup of the scene—the number of distractors present and the availability of useful landmarks. Our results highlight the complex role of visual perception in reference production, showing that speakers can make good use of complexity in ways that reflect their visual processing of the scene. (shrink)

Quine’s general approach is to treat ontology as a matter of what a theory says there is. This turns ontology into a question of which existential statements are consequences of that theory. This approach is contrasted favourably with the view that takes ontological commitment as a relation to things. However within the broadly Quinean approach we can distinguish different accounts, differing as to the nature of the consequence relation best suited for determining those consequences. It is suggested that Quine’s own (...) narrowly formal account fails. Then a consideration of the necessitation approach championed by Jackson and Lewis shows that it does not do justice to the role of acknowledging consequences in determining rationality. I suggest that an approach which puts a priori consequence as the key relation does a better job. The task of spelling out the nature of a priori consequence is sketched, along with reasons to doubt the adequacy of the double indexing approach to analysing the a priori. The sorts of relations we can stand in to theories which allow us to inherit ontological commitments are touched on with a number of important philosophical strategies for introducing belief-like attitudes which nevertheless avoid ontological commitment. (shrink)

In der Technikethik spielt das Konzept der Verantwortung eine zentrale Rolle. ›Verantwortung‹ ist ein Basiskonzept, das, ähnlich wie die Konzepte ›Pflicht‹ oder ›Schuld‹, in vielfältigen Kontexten gebraucht wird. Dennoch lassen sich einige allgemeine Aussagen über seine Bedeutung treffen. Gerade Autoren, die im Bereich der Technik- und Wissenschaftsethik aktiv sind, haben sich nachdrücklich um eine Klärung des allgemeinen Verantwortungsbegriffs und seiner verschiedenen Aspekte und Gebrauchsweisen bemüht.

Advances in science and technology have added to our insights into the vulnerabilities of human agency as well as to the methods of exploiting them. This has raised the stakes for efforts to clarify the concept and ethics of manipulation. Among these efforts, Robert Noggle’s influencer-centered account of manipulation has been most significant. He defines manipulative acts as those whereby an agent intentionally influences a recipient’s attitudes so that they do not conform as closely as they otherwise would to the (...) pertinent norms and ideals endorsed by the influencer. This provides a relatively simple and in many ways clear definition of manipulation. It sidesteps thorny debates about autonomy, freedom, or practical rationality. It also promises to reveal a conceptual parallel between manipulating and lying, and thus to explain why manipulation is pro tanto wrong. In one respect, however, the account remains ambiguous: It remains unclear whether, and to what extent, it requires that influencers’ beliefs about what is ideal for their recipients to be grounded in some effort on the part of the influencer to identify with or take on the role of her recipient. This paper explains this ambiguity. It argues that influencer-centrism cannot remain indifferent to the validity of an agent’s beliefs about the ideal state of the recipient and provide an identification requirement that would render the whole account plausible and sufficiently determinate. (shrink)

The first issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law journal was published in 1992. This paper provides commentaries on nine significant papers drawn from the Journal’s second decade. Four of the papers relate to reasoning with legal cases, introducing contextual considerations, predicting outcomes on the basis of natural language descriptions of the cases, comparing different ways of representing cases, and formalising precedential reasoning. One introduces a method of analysing arguments that was to become very widely used in AI and Law, namely (...) argumentation schemes. Two relate to ontologies for the representation of legal concepts and two take advantage of the increasing availability of legal corpora in this decade, to automate document summarisation and for the mining of arguments. (shrink)

Debates about the development of artificial superintelligence and its potential threats to humanity tend to assume that such a system would be historically unprecedented, and that its behavior must be predicted from first principles. I argue that this is not true: we can analyze multiagent intelligent systems (the best candidates for practical superintelligence) by comparing them to states, which also unite heterogeneous intelligences to achieve superhuman goals. States provide a model for several problems discussed in the literature on superintelligence, such (...) as principal-agent problems and Instrumental Convergence. Philosophical arguments about governance, therefore, provide possible solutions to these problems, or point out problems in previously suggested solutions. In particular, the liberal concept of checks and balances, and Hannah Arendt’s concept of legitimacy, describe how state behavior is constrained by the preferences of constituents that could also apply to artificial systems. However, they also point out ways in which present-day computational developments could destabilize the international order by reducing the number of decision-makers involved in state actions. Thus, interstate competition not only serves as a model for the behavior of dangerous computational intelligences but also as the impetus for their development. (shrink)

The ongoing digital transformation of almost all areas of human action and agency calls for a readjustment of the norms that regulate these practices. For example, the digitisation of communicative practices poses new challenges to their functioning. This paper explains some of these challenges and argues that they cannot be met by a normative framework that focuses mainly on defensive (free speech and property) rights. In the context of mediated digital communication, the application of such a framework may even have (...) paradoxical consequences. Accordingly, this paper argues for a broader system of communicative rights, understood as rights to meaningful participation in well-functioning communicative practices. (shrink)

The article reviews the various ramifications in the discussion on leadership, focusing on the view of leadership as relationships between leaders and followers. Three main types of leader-follower relations are discussed, and their specific characteristics are described: regressive relations, symbolic relations, and developmental relations. After analyzing the major implications, as well as the conceptual limitations, of these perspectives, the article suggests directions for a more integrative conceptualization of leader-follower relations.

The playful discussion of 'horsemanship' that opens Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie has been variously interpreted as a straightforward anecdote about the chivalric arts, or an oblique rhetorical flourish, or something in between. This essay suggests a new context for Sidney's exordium by focusing primarily on its affiliation to the genre of the 'Art of Poetry'. In Horace's Ars poetica and other classical, scholastic and Renaissance treatises, horse–men and other unnatural hybrids embody the tension between decorum and poetic liberty. (...) Three major traditions inform this trope: by the Renaissance the centaur could be an allegory of reason's struggle with the passions, an emblem of the poetic imagination, or a figure for compositional hybridity associated, especially, with Lucianic satire. Reading Sidney in the light of these traditions, finally, this essay explores aspects of the centaur's significance in the Defence and the Arcadia, and suggests that this kind of attention to metaphor might provide a bridge between critical and creative modes of Renaissance poetic thought. (shrink)

Is the theory of evolution by means of natural selection a tautology? This book explores the explanatory structure of Darwin’s theory at a time when selectionist explanations are being brought forward to explain a wider and wider range of phenomena.

Open access-introduction into moral philosophy in German language that contains chapters on the concept of morality, on the development and the main positions of normative ethics, on meta-ethics, and on the various fields of applied ethics. One of its distinctive features is that it explicitly reflects on the role of morality and ethics in modern society and that it analyses the import of alternative conceptual and normative positions for determining this role. The book can be freely downloaded from the publisher's (...) website via the URL below. (shrink)

Mitunter werden Konzeptionen der normativen Ethik als VerfahrensethikenVerfahrensethik bzw. als prozeduralistische Ethiken gekennzeichnet. Dadurch wird offenbar angezeigt, dass in diesen Konzeptionen Verfahren bzw. Prozeduren eine besondere Rolle zukommt. Kontraktualistische, kohärentistische und diskurstheoretischeDiskursethik Ansätze werden in diesem Sinne als exemplarisch betrachtet.

In Tichy's influential attack, a number of egregious errors are attributed to Kripke's seminal distinction of epistemic and metaphysical dimensions in meaning. I argue that Tichy's work is based on important misunderstandings. In particular Tichy attributes to Kripke the mistaken view that it is propositions, that is sets of worlds, which are the proper object of the appellation "a priori" and "a posteriori". I show that this is a mistaken attribution. Further, I argue that propositions cannot be uniquely associated with (...) these appellations. Thus, the position Tichy mistakenly attributes to Kripke, a position which Tichy actually endorses, is unsustainable. (shrink)

Classical logic is explosive in the face of contradiction, yet we find ourselves using inconsistent theories. Mark Colyvan, one of the prominent advocates of the indispensability argument for realism about mathematical objects, suggests that such use can be garnered to develop an argument for commitment to inconsistent objects and, because of that, a paraconsistent underlying logic. I argue to the contrary that it is open to a classical logician to make distinctions, also needed by the paraconsistent logician, which allow a (...) more nuanced ranking of theories in which inconsistent theories can have different degrees of usefulness and productivity. Facing inconsistency does not force us to adopt an underlying paraconsistent logic. Moreover we will see that the argument to best explanation deployed by Colyvan in this context is unsuccessful. I suggest that Quinean approach which Colyvan champions will not lead to the revolutionary doctrines Colyvan endorses. (shrink)

Two questions are addressed in this article: 1. Why are people attracted to leaders? 2. How are leaders' images construed? The first question is analyzed by using the concept of “deity” as a frame of reference for an “ideal model” of leadership. God as a “screen of projections” can satisfy the believer's fundamental needs and desires, as well as serving as a reference for causal attributions and a provider of transcendental meaning. Using Construal Level Theory, deity, as a frame of (...) reference, also facilitates analysis of the second question. This analysis explains universal principles underlying the leadership construal, and the psychological principles and culture-bound processes relevant to construing different images of leadership in different collectives. (shrink)