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John Woods

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

12 papers
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Possible papers

12

FLAP Journal 2022 Journal Article

The Law of Evidence and Labelled Deduction: Ten Years Later.

  • Dov M. Gabbay
  • John Woods

The purpose of this article is to reveal, through examples, the potential for collaboration between the theory of legal reasoning on the one hand, and some recently developed instruments of formal logic. Three zones of contact are highlighted. 1. The law of evidence, in the light of labelled deductive systems (LDSs), discussed through the example of the admissibility of hearsay evidence. 2. The give and take of legal debate in general, and regarding the acceptability of evidence in particular, represented using the abstract systems of argumentation developed in logic, notably the coloured graphs of Bench- Capon. This is considered through an imaginary example. 3. The use of Bayesian networks as tools for analysing the effects of uncertainty on the legal status of actions, illustrated via the same example These three kinds of technique do not exclude each other. On the contrary, many cases of legal argument will need the combined resources of all three.

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FLAP Journal 2021 Journal Article

Douglas Walton: The Early Years.

  • John Woods

In one of his last writings, Douglas Walton tells of his journey as a young modal logician to the heights of his achievements as a computational analyst of argument.1 In it, he makes no mention of the work that had won him considerable early recognition in the years from 1972 to 1982. Of course, there was no space in that short 2019 note for exposure of all that had mattered in Doug’s philosophical working life. But in not mentioning it there, it was made plain how thoroughly he had shred methodological assumptions of his early work. Since I myself was privy, indeed party, to them, it falls to me to try to give some sense of their later loss of purchase. In what follows, I cover the first two intervals of the early period, beginning with the doctoral years in Toronto, then moving to the ten years of his and my work on fallacy theory and related matters. In so doing, I will say more of myself than is fitting in a paper about Doug. But, as I was an eye-witness to the events I’m about to recount, I don’t see how it can be avoided. For reasons that will also be obvious, in referring to him and to self, I shall forego the conventional use of surnames.

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FLAP Journal 2020 Journal Article

Logic's Naturalistic Character.

  • John Woods

For most of its long history, concepts of logical interest were defined over, and instantiated by, constructions of natural language. This is one of the things I have in mind when I speak of logic’s naturalistic character. For the most part, the tripartite distinction between a proposition S’s having a proposition S 0 as a consequence, someone spotting S 0 as a consequence of S 0, and someone drawing that consequence S 0 from that proposition S, had a recognizable, if unannounced, presence in logical theory. A full-service logic of the consequence relation makes theoretical provision for each of the three ways in which it manifests itself. Given that agents are needed for spotting and drawing, decisions must be taken as to the best way of bringing cognitive agency into logical theory. With spotting and drawing, epistemology becomes ineradicably linked to a full-service logic of consequence. Until approximately 170 years ago, logic’s agents were people, that is, beings like us, natural objects of the natural world. This is another of the things I have in mind in speaking of logic’s naturalistic character. The spotting and drawing domains started to change when Pascal’s axioms were adopted as rules of probabilistic inference and human agents were replaced by the mathematical fiction of ideally rational ones. Leibniz had a similar idea for all exact thought. In due course, deductive logic would also take the mathematicizing turn, thereby alienating human beings from the dynamics of spotting and drawing consequences. In the 1970s there arose a pushback that has yet to abate. It opened the road for the restoration of humans as they actually are in real life to the logics that are said to regulate their thinking.

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FLAP Journal 2018 Journal Article

What strategicians might learn from the common law: implicit and tacit understandings of the unwritten.

  • John Woods

This paper is the companion piece of its predecessor in this issue, “The logical foundations of strategic reasoning: Inconsistency-management as a test case for logic.” The present paper explores similarities between mainstream theories of strategy in military engagements and the jurisprudence of legal warfare at the criminal bar of common law justice. This exploration will be framed analogically. Given the implicities that are rife in the common law – the legal system that derives from English law – it only stands to reason that a legal scholar would want to know whether there is a logic and epistemology that reliably attests to the logico-epistemic bona fides of these features of the common law. My answer to that question is in the affirmative. Because the logicoepistemic fabric of strategic reasoning in military and diplomatic contexts is also awash in implicity and tacity, it is only natural to wonder whether the logic and epistemology that call the shots for law also call them for strategics. My answer is that it does. In particular, it is the only logico-epistemic theory that does justice to Luttwak's insistence that strategic reasoning is inherently inconsistent. Parts A, B and C deal with law. In part D, a system of naturalized logic and causal-response epistemology is described, is advanced as a candidate for a theory that would work well for law. Part E reveals how the naturalized causal-response logic handles the inconsistency-management problem for law. Part F applies the analysis to how inconsistency pervades jury-room reasoning without, at the same time, destroying the logico-epistemic integrity of verdicts. Part G brings the paper to a close with an attempt to show that the new logic's accommodations for the implicit, the tacit and the inconsistent can be applied to the management of these same features of strategic reasoning. The central point in both applications is that to a striking extent, reasoning is transacted subconsciously and, in that regard, is itself implicit and tacit.

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FLAP Journal 2014 Journal Article

How Robust Can Inconsistency Get?

  • John Woods

In 2011 Carl Hewitt introduced the concept of inconsistency-robustness (IR). IR is a property of information systems when the following conditions are met. The system is inconsistent, large, practical, inferentially self-aware, and the inconsistency is impossible to expel. Its inconsistency is also empirically discernible and a drag on the system’s performance. Yet distinctively it is also the motivation occasion for performance improvement, albeit with no possibility of inconsistency-free successors. In this attenuated sense, inconsistency is also a desirable feature of IR systems. The technical details of IR are laid out in Hewitt’s logic in progress IRL, itself an extension of his Direct Logic. It is possible that the idea of inconsistency-robustness is exhausted by the formal provisions of IRL. But I want to consider here a more latitudinarian possibility, according to which the idea of inconsistency-robustness admits of intellectually fruitful application well beyond the arcana of IRL. As we proceed, there will be occasion to close in on an interesting idea. It is that inconsistency has a more robust presence in human cognition than in Hewitt’s large systems. More particularly, it is a presence unattended by cognitive dissonance. Concerning which, we conjecture that there is a plenitude of propositions unambiguously both true and false which cause no affront to the law of contradiction. Rightly enough, some will see this as a dialethic conclusion. But it is not to be found in the present-day logics of dialethic logic.

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