In attempting to build intelligent litigation support tools, we have moved beyond first generation, production rule legal expert systems. Our work integrates rule based and case based reasoning with intelligent information retrieval.When using the case based reasoning methodology, or in our case the specialisation of case based retrieval, we need to be aware of how to retrieve relevant experience. Our research, in the legal domain, specifies an approach to the retrieval problem which relies heavily on an extended object oriented/rule based (...) system architecture that is supplemented with causal background information. We use a distributed agent architecture to help support the reasoning process of lawyers. (shrink)

_Plato's Thought_ offers an excellent introduction to Plato, guiding the reader through Plato's Theory of Forms, and examining his views on art, education and statecraft. This edition includes an introduction, bibliographic essay, and bibliography by Donald Zeyl.

An essential read for activists, community organizers, and justice scholars Critical Animal Studies and Social Justice: Critical Theory, Dismantling Speciesism, and Total Liberation is a collection that combines scholarship and activism in nine ground-breaking and provocative chapters. The book includes contributions from around the world influenced by critical theory, feminism, social justice, political theory, media studies, environmental justice, food justice, disability studies, and Black liberation. By promoting total liberation and liberatory politics, these essays challenge the reader to think about new (...) approaches to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. The contributors examine and disrupt many of the exclusionary assumptions and behaviors by those working toward justice and liberation, encouraging the reader to reflect on their own thoughts and actions. (shrink)

Public health emergencies have occurred throughout history, encompassing such events as plagues and famines arising from natural causes, disease pandemics interrelated with wars, and industrial accidents such as the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, among others. Law and legal tools have played an important role in addressing such emergencies. Three prime U.S. examples are Congressional authorization of quarantine as early as 1796, legally mandated smallpox vaccination upheld in a landmark 1905 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and the President's 2003 executive order adding SARS (...) to the federal government's list of “quarantinable communicable diseases.”The public health emergencies of the present — both actual and potential — pose equally serious threats but do so in the context of greatly magnified expectations that stem directly from the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the immediately following anthrax attacks. (shrink)

Intersectionality of Critical Animal Studies: A Historical Collection represents the very best that the Journal for Critical Animal Studies (JCAS) has published in terms of articles that are written by activists and for activists.

Persuasion is an activity that involves one party trying to induce another party to believe something or to do something. It is an important and multifaceted human facility. Obviously, sales and ma...

Using Chicago as our case, this article puts forth a notion of black placemaking that privileges the creative, celebratory, playful, pleasurable, and poetic experiences of being black and being around other black people in the city. Black placemaking refers to the ways that urban black Americans create sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance through social interaction. Our framework offers a corrective to existing accounts that depict urban blacks as bounded, plagued by violence, victims and perpetrators, unproductive, and isolated from one (...) another and the city writ large. While ignoring neither the external assaults on black spaces nor the internal dangers that can make everyday life difficult, we highlight how black people make places in spite of those realities. Our four cases – the black digital commons, black public housing reunions, black lesbian and gay nightlife, and black Little League baseball – elucidate the matter of black lives across genders, sexualities, ages, classes, and politics. (shrink)

Presents translations of five dialogues from Plato, as well as additional notes on history and mythology.

A NewsFusion System is a logic-based system for merging heterogeneous structured news reports. Structured news reports are XML documents, where the textentries are restricted to individual words or simple phrases, such as names and domain-specific terminology, and numbers and units. We assume structured news reports do not require natural language processing. In previous papers, we have presented aspects of a logic-based framework for merging structured news reports based on fusion rules. Fusion rules are a form of scripting language that define (...) how structured news reports should be merged. The antecedent of a fusion rule is a call to investigate the information in the structured news reports and the background knowledge, and the consequent of a fusion rule is a formula specifying an action to be undertaken to form a merged report. It is expected that a set of fusion rules is defined for any given application. In this paper, we present a framework for aggregation predicates that can be used in fusion rules for context-dependent aggregation of structured news reports. We also present a case study that uses aggregation predicates to merge weather reports that have been obtained from a selection of websites. (shrink)

This account of propositional logic concentrates on the algorithmic translation of important methods, especially of decision procedures for (subclasses of) propositional logic. Important classical results and a series of new results taken from the fields of normal forms, satisfiability and deduction methods are arranged in a uniform and complete theoretic framework. The algorithms presented can be applied to VLSI design, deductive databases and other areas. After introducing the subject the authors discuss satisfiability problems and satisfiability algorithms with complexity considerations, the (...) resolution calculus with different refinements, and special features and procedures for Horn formulas. Then, a selection of further calculi and some results on the complexity of proof procedures are presented. The last chapter is devoted to quantified boolean formulas. The algorithmic approach will make this book attractive to computer scientists and graduate students in areas such as automated reasoning, logic programming, complexity theory and pure and applied logic. (shrink)

Anthony Giddens has been described as “the most important English social philosopher of our time.” Over 25 years, with a dazzling series of books that attest to his unrelenting productivity, he has established himself as today’s most widely read and widely cited social theorist. In recent years, his writings have become more explicitly political, and in 1996 he became Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science. It is in this position that he has been accepted as (...) the key intellectual figure of Tony Blair’s New Labour government. Giddens’s interests have always been remarkably diverse, ranging from Continental philosophy to self-help therapy, and his work builds on a critical engagement with an extraordinary array of texts from within and beyond the canon of the social sciences. His ideas have profoundly influenced the writing and teaching of the central ideas of the rapidly changing study of modernity. These seven extended interviews with Christopher Pierson, conducted shortly after Giddens’s arrival at the LSE, seek to cover the full range of his thought since the early 1970’s, beginning with his engagement with the makers of “classical” sociology and concluding with his thoughts on the nature of world politics under what Giddens terms “reflexive modernity.” The style of the interviews is conversational, and Giddens sets forth his ideas with his customary clarity and directness. In addition to the interviews, four short pieces at the end of the book give examples of Giddens’s recent thought, treating Tony Blair’s political philosophy, the risk society concept in the context of British politics, and the dangers of chemical contamination. The volume concludes with a conversation between Giddens and European financier and philanthropist George Soros. (shrink)

In abstract argumentation, each argument is regarded as atomic. There is no internal structure to an argument. Also, there is no specification of what is an argument or an attack. They are assumed to be given. This abstract perspective provides many advantages for studying the nature of argumentation, but it does not cover all our needs for understanding argumentation or for building tools for supporting or undertaking argumentation. If we want a more detailed formalization of arguments than is available with (...) abstract argumentation, we can turn to structured argumentation, which is the topic of this special issue of Argument and Computation. In structured argumentation, we assume a formal language for representing knowledge and specifying how arguments and counterarguments can be constructed from that knowledge. An argument is then said to be structured in the sense that normally, the premises and claim of the argument are made explicit, and the relationship between the premises and claim is formally defined (for instance, using logical entailment). In this introduction, we provide a brief overview of the approaches covered in this special issue on structured argumentation. (shrink)

A study was undertaken of the views of users of two genitourinary medicine (GUM) clinics in England on unlinked anonymous testing (UAT) for HIV. The UAT programme measures the prevalence of HIV in the population, including undiagnosed prevalence, by testing residual blood (from samples taken for clinical purposes) which is anonymised and irreversibly unlinked from the source. 424 clinic users completed an anonymous questionnaire about their knowledge of, and attitudes towards, UAT. Only 1/7 (14%) were aware that blood left over (...) from clinical testing may be tested anonymously for HIV. A large majority (89%) said they would agree to their blood being tested, although 74% wanted the opportunity to consent. These findings indicate broad support for UAT of blood in a group of patients whose samples are included in the HIV surveillance programme. The findings suggest the need for greater attention to be given to the provision of information and, if replicated in a larger survey, may justify a reappraisal of UK policy on UAT. (shrink)

This volume surveys 150 law books of fundamental importance in the history of Western legal literature and culture. The entries are organized in three sections: the first dealing with the transitional period of fifteenth-century editions of medieval authorities, the second spanning the early modern period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and the third focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors are scholars from all over the world. Each 'old book' is analyzed by a recognized specialist in (...) the specific field of interest. Individual entries give a short biography of the author and discuss the significance of the works in the time and setting of their publication, and in their broader influence on the development of law worldwide. Introductory essays explore the development of Western legal traditions, especially the influence of the English common law, and of Roman and canon law on legal writers, and the borrowings and interaction between them. The book goes beyond the study of institutions and traditions of individual countries to chart a broader perspective on the transmission of legal concepts across legal, political, and geographical boundaries. Examining the branches of this genealogical tree of books makes clear their pervasive influence on modern legal systems, including attempts at rationalizing custom or creating new hybrid systems by transplanting Western legal concepts into other jurisdictions. (shrink)

A deductive argument is a pair where the first item is a set of premises, the second item is a claim, and the premises entail the claim. This can be formalised by assuming a logical language for the premises and the claim, and logical entailment (or consequence relation) for showing that the claim follows from the premises. Examples of logics that can be used include classical logic, modal logic, description logic, temporal logic, and conditional logic. A counterargument for an argument (...) A is an argument B where the claim of B contradicts the premises of A. Different choices of logic, and different choices for the precise definitions of argument and counterargument, give us a range of possibilities for formalising deductive argumentation. Further options are available to us for choosing the arguments and counterarguments we put into an argument graph. If we are to construct an argument graph based on the arguments that can be constructed from a knowledgebase, then we can be exhaustive in including all arguments and counterarguments that can be constructed from the knowledgebase. But there are other options available to us. We consider some of the possibilities in this review. (shrink)

Persuasion is an important and yet complex aspect of human intelligence. When undertaken through dialogue, the deployment of good arguments, and therefore counterarguments, clearly has a significant effect on the ability to be successful in persuasion. A key dimension for determining whether an argument is good is the impact that it has on the concerns of the intended audience of the argument ( e.g., the other participant(s) in the dialogue). In this paper, we investigate how we can acquire and represent (...) concerns of a participant, and her preferences over them, and we show how this can be used for selecting good moves in a persuasion dialogue. We provide results from empirical studies showing that: (1) we can gather preferences over types of concern; (2) there is a common understanding of what is meant by concerns; (3) participants tend to make moves according to their preferences; and (4) the persuader can use these preferences to improve the persuasiveness of a dialogue. (shrink)

Persuasion is an important and yet complex aspect of human intelligence. When undertaken through dialogue, the deployment of good arguments, and therefore counterarguments, clearly has a significant effect on the ability to be successful in persuasion. Two key dimensions for determining whether an argument is “good” in a particular dialogue are the degree to which the intended audience believes the argument and counterarguments, and the impact that the argument has on the concerns of the intended audience. In this paper, we (...) present a framework for modelling persuadees in terms of their beliefs and concerns, and for harnessing these models in optimizing the choice of move in persuasion dialogues. Our approach is based on the Monte Carlo Tree Search which allows optimization in real-time. We provide empirical results of a study with human participants that compares an automated persuasion system based on this technology with a baseline system that does not take the beliefs and concerns into account in its strategy. (shrink)

1. In this special issue of the Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics, we aim to celebrate the recent retirement of Philippe Besnard as directeur de recherche in the Centre National de Recherche...

This paper aims at laying some foundations of a logic of argumentation in which arguments, as well as attacks and supports among arguments are all defined in a unifying formalism. In the latter, an argument is denoted as a pair displaying a reason and a conclusion but no condition is required to hold relating the reason to the conclusion. We introduce a series of inference rules relating arguments and show how the resulting system captures important features of argumentation that hitherto (...) have not been captured by existing formalisms. (shrink)

This volume deals with approaches to handling contradictory information. These include approaches for actual contradiction - both A and not-A can be proven from the information - and approaches for potential contradiction - where the information may contain arguments for A and arguments for not-A, but the system suppresses the contradiction by, for example, preferring some arguments over others. Approaches covered include paraconsistent logics, modal logics, default logics, conditional logics, defeasible logics and paraconsistent semantics for logic programming. The volume is (...) of interest to students, researchers and practitioners in artificial intelligence, software engineering, logic, language and philosophy. This volume is the first handbook to give a comprehensive coverage of handling contradictory information. (shrink)

Nietzsche is to Hegel what a bird breaking its shell is to a bird contentedly absorbing the substance within. Georges Bataille, 1938.