The Ontology of Legal Possibilites and Legal Potentialities
Pamela Gray
Working Paper No. 16/07
December 2007
About the Author
- Pamela Gray
School of Accounting and Computer Science
Charles Sturt University
Charles Sturt University – Faculty of Business Working Paper Series
Managing Editor: Associate Professor Jayne Bisman, School of Accounting, Bathurst
Editors: Dr P. Mathews, School of Commerce, Wagga Wagga
Associate Professor M. O'Mullane, School of Business, Albury
Dr R. Tierney, School of Marketing and Management, Bathurst
Dr D Ardagh, School of Commerce, Wagga Wagga
Ms K Mather, School of Computing and Mathematics, Wagga Wagga
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Abstract
Ontologies in a legal expert system must be processed to suit all possible users cases. This requires a deep computational model of legal epistemology which has been found in an archaeology of legal knowledge (cf. Foucault, 1969, 1972) that began with Gray (1997) and concluded with Gray (2007). Some highlights of the latter work are explained in this paper; the investigation poses a clearance of the Feigenbaum bottleneck.
Firstly, Lord Chancellor Bacon's (1620) reconstruction of legal epistemology as scientific method for expanding knowledge, is developed as a method of constructing an ontology of legal possibilities and legal potentialities, which is essential for determining the heuristics of combinatorial explosion derived from express legal rules to meet the possible cases of users; while legal experts need only construct the relevant part of the combinatorial explosion, for a client's case, an expert system must be capable of constructing any relevant part to suit a user's case.
Secondly, law-making authority includes the power to determine the logical category of legal premises, and legal truth tables; thus ontological posits of law-makers provide for the logical processing of legal information. Rules of law are Major deductive premises laid down, formally or informally, as conditional propositions which may be systematised for extended deductive reasoning. Material facts in a case are laid down as inductive instances that particularise or define antecedents in rules of law; they also may be used as Minor deductive premises to determine the outcome of the case. Reasons for rules are laid down as and for strong or weak abductive reasoning.
Thirdly, legal knowledge engineering requires prior analytics (cf. Aristotle, 1952, originally c.335 BC ). Legal epistemology both determines and implements logical structures; it uses ontologies of legal possibilities and potentialities, to comprehensively predetermine premises for the three forms of legal logic: deduction, induction and abduction. This deep model of legal expertise is the jurisprudential basis of the design of the eGanges shell for epistemologically sound applications, including large scale legal expert systems (Gray and Gray, 2003); it is suitable for transformation from the domain specification of the deep model, through the metamorphic stages of knowledge engineering, to epistemologically sound legal expert systems (Gray, 2004)(Gray, 2005).