Abstract
The first three chapters of this book introduced the issue of reasoning with rules and provided a jurisprudential analysis of it. In the chapters IV and V, RBL was introduced and its facilities for dealing with the several aspects of legal reasoning were illustrated. In this concluding chapter I will attempt to tie some remaining strings together.
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References
In earlier versions of RBL, such as in Hage and Verheij 1995, they were different.
N stands here for the traditional operator for logical necessity. Cf. Chellas 1980, p. 4.
Adoption of this form of incompatibility in combination with the principle incompatibility would add a kind of consistency maintenance to RBL. Cf. section 16. I
For some definitions of the deontic predicates these incompatibilities would be inconsistencies.
From a philosophical point of view I reject his view that reasons are in general psychological states. Cf. section II.1.1.
Cf. in this connection Pollock’s (1987) discussion of the lottery-paradox.
Cf. the discussion about the all-or-nothing character of rules in section III.10.
Notice the parallel between on the one hand the distinction between probability and degree, and on the other hand epistemic and constitutive reasons. Cf. chapter II, the introduction to part D (kinds of reasons).
Degrees correspond to dimensions in the HYPO-system. Cf. Ashley 1991.
The theory proposed by Verheij (1995) to some extent combines the three forms of reasoning by allowing the phenomenon of ‘sequential weakening’. This phenomenon boils down to that the justification for the conclusion of an argument can become weaker, depending on the length of the argument which leads to it.
N stands here for the traditional operator for logical necessity. Cf. Chellas 1980, p. 4.
This characteristic of rules may be the cause of the error to consider rules as a kind of imperatives. Not everything that makes the world fit itself is an imperative. Baptising, for instance, also makes the world fit the speech act. Peczenik 1989, p. 199/200 makes a distinction between practical and theoretical statements, which is similar to the distinction between directions of fit as illustrated by Searle’s example. The distinction between constitution and description is different, however. Sentences that express deontic facts are descriptive, while deontic rules (and — for that matter -all other rules) are constitutive. The distinctions deontic/non-deontic and constitutive/non-constitutive do not coincide.
That the information content (the meaning) of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituents, is sometimes called the Tregian principle’. Cf. Allwood et al. 1977, p. 130.
It is interesting to compare the formalisation of the rules in the present example with the way in which the outcome of colliding forces is described in sentences that describe all possible cases. Cf. section III.1.
Precise definitions of extensions can be found in Reiter 1980.
Examples of such logics are the work of Pollock (e.g. 1987), Simari and Loui 1992, Prakken 1993, Vreeswijk 1993, and Dung 1995. Not all argument-based logics have the category of undecided conflicts of arguments.
By reconstructing an argument, so as to include two or more reasons into one argument, this characteristic of argument-based logics can be circumvented. This has all the disadvantages of adapting the premises, however. Cf. section I.3.5 and also section 16.4 of this chapter.
I will omit some technical details which are not essential for the comparison between PS-logic and RBL. This means that the description of PS-logic is not sufficiently precise to evaluate PS-logic on its own. I expect, however, that it is sufficiently precise for the comparison with RBL. Moreover, the terminology used in the comparison is not that of Prakken and Sartor 1995, but my own.
This may not be fully correct for some deviant arguments in which rules are used that refer to themselves and to each other. Cf. section IV.8. For those cases, PS-logic might offer a slightly different solution than RBL.
Possible world semantics, or modeltheoretic semantics, is a way to make the notion of information content that is connected with a set of sentences, precise. As a technical device, this type of semantics can however be stretched to cover completely different views of logical validity. An example of this can be found in section 14, which provides a possible worlds semantics for RBL, a logic which is absolutely not based on the container metaphor.
Cf. also section 15.
Cf. section II. 10 on the dispositional nature of reasons.
Here I use the word ‘argument’ in the sense of something that is adduced within a line of reasoning.
Cf. section II.11.2 on unwanted associations.
Cf. section II.11.1 on the consciousness of reasons.
Cf. section III.5.3 on the validity of social rules.
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Hage, J.C. (1997). Concluding Observations. In: Reasoning with Rules. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 27. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8873-7_6
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