Project Details
Projekt
Revising rational beliefs in legal reasoning: Defeasibility, Counterexamples, and probabilities
Subject Area
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Term
from 2011 to 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 201369889
Recent research on conditional reasoning shows that people defeat valid conclu-sions if they can imagine situations in which the precondition of the conditional is fulfilled but the consequent does not follow. Cognitive psychologists refer to these contradicting situations as counterexamples, exceptions, or abnormalities. In the last three years, we investigated the defeasibility and the role of counterexamples in reasoning with legal conditionals such as ''If a person kills another human, then this person should be punished for manslaughter''. We showed that legal experts and laypeople respond differently to counterexamples, for instance exculpatory circum-stance such as that the person acted in self-defense. While legal experts consider counterexamples according to the regulations of penal code, laypeople base their decisions on their moral standards and intuitive sense of justice.In the next three years, we want to continue to strengthen the link between defeasi-bility, legal reasoning, and rationality. First, we want to draw further connections be-tween non-monotonic logics and the consideration of counterexamples in human legal reasoning. We plan a series of experiments to investigate how the probability and believability of counterexamples influence their acceptance and how the con-sideration of counterexamples changes depending on whether legal rules are pre-sented as factual or deontic legal conditionals. Second, we want to extend our re-search to the investigation of the rationality of balancing. Balancing is a hot topic in legal theory and describes how judges decide about conflicting fundamental rights (e.g. freedom of press vs. right to privacy). Here want to compare the decision of hu-man participants with the norms from legal theory. Third, we want to relate our find-ings to different logical systems developed in philosophy and AI to make progress towards an integrated theory of defeasible legal reasoning and argumentation. Fi-nally, we want to transfer our results to more ecologic valid scenarios and investi-gate the daily-life legal reasoning of judges and legal laypeople. All our experiments will be designed taking into account the psychological and legal theoretical state of the art. Participants will be laypeople and legal experts. Our investigations are not only important for psychology and legal theory, but also for our society.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
Subproject of
SPP 1516:
New Frameworks of Rationality
