Abstract
In this paper, we present a particular role for abductive reasoning in law by applying it in the context of an argumentation scheme for practical reasoning. We present a particular scheme, based on an established scheme for practical reasoning, that can be used to reason abductively about how an agent might have acted to reach a particular scenario, and the motivations for doing so. Plausibility here depends on a satisfactory explanation of why this particular agent followed these motivations in the particular situation. The scheme is given a formal grounding in terms of action-based alternating transition systems and we illustrate the approach with a running legal example.
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Notes
When speaking of persons we might call such a preference ‘character’ and may attempt to explain what kind of character the person has, cf. Walton (2007).
We use ‘non-abductive’ instead of ‘deductive’ because deductive implies that normal practical reasoning is not presumptive/defeasible, which, of course, it is.
Determining the audience given a VAF and an admissible set is computable in polynomial time (Bench-Copan 2007), so there are no complexity issues, even in large examples.
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Bex, F., Bench-Capon, T. & Atkinson, K. Did he jump or was he pushed?. Artif Intell Law 17, 79–99 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-009-9074-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-009-9074-z