Deontic logic is a logic often used to formalise scenarios in the legal domain. Within the legal domain there are many exceptions and conflicting obligations. This motivates the enrichment of deontic logic with not only the notion of defeasibility, which allows for reasoning about exceptions, but a stronger notion of typicality that is based on defeasibility. KLM-style defeasible reasoning is a logic system that employs defeasibility while Propositional Typicality Logic (PTL) is a logic that does the same for the notion of typicality. Deontic paradoxes are often used to examine logic systems as the paradoxes provide undesirable results even if the scenarios seem intuitive. Forrester’s paradox is one of the most famous of these paradoxes. This paper shows that KLM-style defeasible reasoning and PTL can be used to represent and reason with Forrester’s paradox in such a way as to block undesirable conclusions without completely sacrificing desirable deontic properties.
Fairness and stability are normative concepts that have been investigated for many social choice domains. Recently, increasing attention has fallen on richer, and more complex, settings and we look to develop, and study in depth, these fairness and stability notions in a variety of such complex domains.
We study a model inspired by deliberative practice, in which agents selectively disclose evidence about a set of alternatives prior to taking a final decision on them. We are interested in whether such a process, when iterated to termination, results in the objectively best alternatives being selected—thereby lending support to the idea that groups can be wise even when their members communicate with each other. We find that, under certain restrictions on the relative amounts of evidence, together with the actions available to the agents, there exist deliberation protocols in each of the two families we look at (i.e., simultaneous and sequential) that offer desirable guarantees. Simulation results further complement this picture, by showing how the distribution of evidence among the agents influences parameters of interest, such as the outcome of the protocols and the number of rounds until termination.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.