57 research outputs found
Presumptions and Modal Logic: A Hohfeldian Approach
The difficulty of distinguishing between an inference and a presumption, a difficulty that bedevils tort and evidence teachers, (see Appendix I) among others, may be dispelled by a study of the deontic nature of permissible inferences and presumptions. Using scholastic terminology, an inference is a function of the intellect, not the will. Therefore, deontic notions of permission and duty seem foreign to inference. However, deontic notions are legitimate, because the law, in assigning a fact finding function to judge and jury, uses deontic notions in assigning fact finding competence. Thus, the statement that an inference is not permissible means that insufficient evidence has been introduced to permit the jury to find the fact in question. It does not matter whether the jury, by applying its collective intelligence, would draw the inference. Their incompetence to draw the inference is not a function of rationality, but of a rule of law that deprives them of competence
A-Hohfeld: A Language for Robust Structural Representation of Knowledge in the Legal Domain to Build Interpretation-Assistance Expert Systems
The A-Hohfeld language is presented as a set of definitions; it can be used to precisely express legal norms. The usefulness of the AHohfeld language is illustrated in articulating 2560 alternative structural interpretations of the four-sentence 1982 Library Regulations of Imperial College and constructing an interpretation-assistance legal expert system for these regulations by means of the general-purpose Interpretation-Assistance legal expert system builder called MINT. The logical basis for A-Hohfeld is included as an appendix
Formalizing Hohfeldian Analysis to Clarify the Multiple Senses of \u27Legal Right\u27: A Powerful Lens for the Electronic Age
Careful communication is frequently of central importance in law. The language used to communicate even with oneself in private thought profoundly influences the quality of that effort; but when one attempts to transmit an idea to another, language assumes even greater significance because of the possibilities for enormously distorting the idea. Word skill is to be prized
Modality and the semantics-pragmatics interface
This thesis explores certain aspects of the structure of lexical semantics and its
interaction with pragmatic processes of utterance comprehension, using as a case-study
a sample of the English modal verbs. Contrary to previous polysemy-based accounts, I
propose and defend a unitary semantic account of the English modals, and I give a
relevance-theoretic explanation of the construction of their admissible (mainly, root and
epistemic) contextual interpretations. Departing from previous accounts of modality, I
propose a link between epistemic modality and metarepresentation, and treat the
emergence of epistemic modal markers as a result of the development of the human
theory of mind.
In support of my central contention that the English modals are semantically
univocal, I reanalyse a range of arguments employed by previous polysemy-based
approaches. These arguments involve the distributional properties of the modals, their
relationship to truth-conditional content, the status of so-called speech-act modality, and the
historical development of epistemic meanings: it turns out that none of these domains can
offer reasons to abandon the univocal semantic analysis of the English modals. Furthermore,
I argue that the priority of root over epistemic meanings in language acquisition is
predicted by the link between epistemic modality and metarepresentation. Finally, data
from a cognitive disorder (autism) are considered in the light of the metarepresentation
hypothesis about epistemic modality.
The discussion of modality has a number of implications for the concept of
polysemy. I suggest that, despite its widespread use in current lexical semantics,
polysemy is not a natural class, and use the example of the Cognitive Linguistics to
illustrate that polysemy presupposes some questionable assumptions about the
structure of lexical concepts. I propose a division of labour between ambiguity,
semantic underdeterminacy, and a narrowed version of polysemy, and present its
ramifications for the psychology of word meaning. In the final chapter, I extend the
proposed framework for modality to the analysis of generic sentences, thereby
capturing certain similarities between genericity and modality
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