Stable Legal Knowledge with Regard to Contradictory Arguments

S. Hagiwara and S. Tojo (Japan)

Keywords

knowledge-base, legal reasoning, legal argument, logical inconsistency, paraconsistent logic, knowledge revision

Abstract

A large size of legal knowledge base which consists of entangled inference rules, facts, and arbitrary interpre tations may latently include inconsistency within them. In this paper, we propose a method to find the source of such inconsistency by supplying hypothesized facts into a set of rules. With this, we put those rules in the order of relia bility and show a stable part of the legal knowledge. First, we define an argument as a chaining of rules to support a certain proposition. Thereafter, we compose a minimal inconsistency set (MIS) combining two disagreeing argu ments. Among such a MIS, we can distinguish stable rules that is indifferent to the source of inconsistent from unsta ble rules, which can be candidates of future amendment. A knowledge-base which consists of stable rules can be also distinguished from that which may contain unstable rules.

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