Cognition, Epistemology, and Reasoning about Evidence within the Legal Domain

Common Knowledge in Legal Reasoning about Evidence

It is shown how tools of argument analysis currently being developed in artificial intelligence can be applied to legal judgments about evidence based on common knowledge. Chains of reasoning containing generalizations and implicit premises that express common knowledge are modeled using argument diagrams and argumentation schemes. A controversial thesis is argued for. It is the thesis that suc...

On Qualitative Probabilities for Legal Reasoning about Evidence

A crucial aspect of evidential reasoning in crime investigation involves comparing the support that evidence provides for alternative hypotheses. Recent work in forensic statistics has shown how Bayesian Networks (BNs) can be employed for this purpose. However, the specification of BNs requires conditional probability tables describing the uncertain processes under evaluation. When these proces...

Epistemology, Rationality, and Cognition

1.1 Setting Aside the Gettier Problem Since Gettier, much of epistemology has focused on analyzing “S knows that P”, but that is not my interest. My general interest is in rational cognition — both in what it is to be rational, and in how rational cognition works. The traditional epistemological question, “How do you know?”, can be taken as addressing part of the more general problem of produci...

Epistemology of Legal Judgments

Reasoning about Accountability within Delegation

We propose a framework for the analysis of delegation proto cols Our framework allows to analyse how accountability is transferred or kept by delegator when he transfers some of her rights to delegate The ability to trace how accountability is distributed among principals of a system is crucial in many transactions that have a legal value because accountability is usually a prerequisite to guar...