Formal Philosophy and Legal Reasoning: The Validity of Legal Inferences
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of the present paper is to introduce a method to test the validity of legal inferences. We begin by presenting the rationale of our method and then we expose the philosophical foundations of our analysis. If formal philosophy is to be of help to legal discourse, then it must first reflect upon the law's fundamental characteristics that should be taken into account. Our analysis shows that (Canadian) legal discourse possesses three fundamental characteristics which ought to be considered if one wants to represent the formal structure of legal arguments. These characteristics are the presupposed consistency of legal discourse, the fact that there is a hierarchy between norms and obligations to preserve this consistency and the fact that legal inferences are subjected to the principle of deontic consequences. We present a formal deontic logic which is built according to these characteristics and provide the completeness results. Finally, we present a semi-formal method (based on the proposed deontic logic) to test the validity of legal inferences. This paper contributes to the literature insofar as it provides a method that covers a portion of the intuitive validity of legal inferences which is not covered by other frameworks.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it