Defeasibility applied to Forrester’s paradox

Abstract

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.