No label defined (Q4394895)

This paper presents a very rich and thorough study of concepts of defeasibility applicable in deontic logic. As deontic logic is the logic of reasoning about what ought to be the case, and defeasible logic is the logic of reasoning about what is normally the case, defeasible deontic logic combines the two, for a logic of reasoning about what one normally ought to do. Questions arise regarding failures to do what one normally ought to do; are they exceptions to the normal case, or are they violations? And how shall one reason in situations where there has been such a failure? This paper presents a number of frameworks for addressing such questions. In particular, it distinguishes the cancelling of an obligation from its overshadowing, and for the latter it distinguishes three types of defeasibility: factual defeasibility, which models violability; strong overriding defeasibility, which models specificity of norms; and weak overriding defeasibility, which models prima facie obligations. These concepts are extensively illustrated and applied to scenarios like the contrary-to-duty paradoxes, where it appears that different scenarios require different sorts of defeasibility. These concepts of defeasibility are formalized in terms of the inference relations of dyadic deontic logics, and a number of preference-based semantics for the language are defined to analyze the different types of defeasibility. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0885.00033].