Revising rational beliefs in legal reasoning: Defeasibility, Counterexamples, and probabilities

最近关于条件推理的研究表明，如果人们能够想象条件的前提得到满足而结果没有得到的情况，那么他们就会推翻有效的结论。认知心理学家将这些相互矛盾的情况称为反例、例外或反常。在过去的三年里，我们调查了反例在推理中的可行性和反例在推理中的作用，这些反例使用了法律条件，例如，如果一个人杀害了另一个人，那么这个人应该因过失杀人罪而受到惩罚。我们表明，法律专家和普通人对反例的反应是不同的，例如，无罪的情况，如此人是出于自卫。当法律专家根据刑法的规定考虑反例时，外行人则是根据他们的道德标准和直觉的正义感做出决定。在接下来的三年里，我们要继续加强失败、法律推理和理性之间的联系。首先，我们希望将非单调逻辑与人类法律推理中反例的考虑进一步联系起来。我们计划进行一系列实验，以调查反例的概率和可信度如何影响其被接受，以及反例的考虑如何根据法律规则是被呈现为事实法律条件句还是道义法律条件句而改变。其次，我们想把我们的研究延伸到平衡合理性的考察上。平衡是法律理论中的一个热门话题，描述了法官如何就相互冲突的基本权利(如新闻自由与隐私权)做出裁决。在这里，我们想要将胡曼参与者的决定与法学理论中的规范进行比较。第三，我们希望将我们的Find-Ings与哲学和人工智能中发展的不同逻辑系统联系起来，以朝着可废止的法律推理和论证的综合理论取得进展。最终，我们希望将我们的结果转移到更生态的有效情景中，并研究法官和法律外行的日常法律推理。我们所有的实验都将考虑到心理学和法律理论的最新水平。参与者将是普通人和法律专家。我们的研究不仅对心理学和法学理论有重要意义，而且对我们的社会也有重要意义。

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.