We provide a retrospective of 25 years of the International Conference on AI and Law, which was first held in 1987. Fifty papers have been selected from the thirteen conferences and each of them is described in a short subsection individually written by one of the 24 authors. These subsections attempt to place the paper discussed in the context of the development of AI and Law, while often offering some personal reactions and reflections. As a whole, the subsections build into (...) a history of the last quarter century of the field, and provide some insights into where it has come from, where it is now, and where it might go. (shrink)

The meta-problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why we have problem intuitions about consciousness, why we intuitively think that conscious experience cannot be scientifically explained. In his discussion of this problem, David Chalmers briefly considers the possibility of giving a 'genealogical' solution, according to which problem intuitions are 'accidents of cultural history' (2018, p. 33). Chalmers' response to this solution is largely dismissive. In this paper, we defend the viability of a genealogical solution. Our strategy is to focus (...) on a particular problem intuition: the thought that the phenomenal character of colour experience is irreducibly subjective. We use the history of the inverted spectrum thought experiment as a window into how various philosophers have thought about colour experience. Our genealogy reveals that problem intuitions about colour are not timeless, but instead arise in a specific historical context, one that, in large part, explains why we have these intuitions. (shrink)

Oświecenia nie byłoby bez zwrotu w stronę rozumu, a ten nie jest żadną ideą, lecz własnością nader pospolitą – już sto lat wcześniej René Descartes powiadał, że nikt nie uskarża się na jego brak. Osiemnastowieczni filozofowie bodajże po raz pierwszy problematyzują owo nikt, pytając o rozum dzieci, „dzikich”, sawantów, geniuszy, wynalazców, szaleńców, ba – kobiet (dziewczynek, dziewcząt), aktualnych i przyszłych matek „rodu ludzkiego”, a nie tylko o „rozum ludzki”. Ma on zresztą wiele postaci – common sense, zdrowy rozum (rozsądek), „chłopski (...) rozum”, rozum praktyczny, czysty, spekulatywny itd., a także granicę, którą jest utrata rozumu lub zmysłów. Zawsze jednak objawia się wśród ludzi, pośród ludzkich spraw, bez względu na to, czy aktualnie należymy do jakiejś wspólnoty, czy – jak w pewnym momencie Robinson Crusoe albo Denis Diderot – zostaliśmy z niej czasowo wyłączeni. Epoka rozumu, jak zwykło się w skrócie charakteryzować „optymistyczne” Oświecenie, dostrzegała i eksponowała jego faktyczność i jednostkowość – rozum jest zawsze i tylko czyjąśdyspozycją – nie tracąc przy tym z oczu innej jego niezbywalnej cechy: powszechności. Wszystko może nas dzielić – pochodzenie, język, religia, płeć, zamożność, zdrowie, wykształcenie czy upodobania, lecz taki sam i ten sam jest mój i twój rozum. Tom prezentuje wyniki badań nad filozofią Oświecenia prowadzonych w wielu ośrodkach naukowych w kraju. Tym, co łączy wszystkie pomieszczone w nim teksty, jest zwrócenie uwagi na oświeceniowe rozumienie społecznej natury człowieka. Autorzy przedstawiają jej różne aspekty: od funkcjonowania instytucji służących prowadzeniu i upowszechnianiu badań naukowych, przez osiemnastowieczne projekty edukacyjne, kształtowanie się ówczesnych gustów estetycznych i znaczenie przykładane do języków narodowych, aż po społeczny wymiar medycyny. Prace te nie tylko ukazują, jak bardzo złożony jest obraz Oświecenia, ale też przypominają, że depozytariuszami opiewanego w tej epoce rozumu jesteśmy my – poszczególni ludzie, a jego funkcjonowanie wymaga istnienia rozmaitych łączących nas więzi. (shrink)

The paper gives ontologies in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) for Legal Case-based Reasoning (LCBR) systems, giving explicit, formal, and general specifications of a conceptualisation LCBR. Ontologies for different systems allows comparison and contrast between them. OWL ontologies are standardised, machine-readable formats that support automated processing with Semantic Web applications. Intermediate concepts, concepts between base-level concepts and higher level concepts, are central in LCBR. The main issues and their relevance to ontological reasoning and to LCBR are discussed. Two LCBR systems (...) (AS-CATO, which is based on CATO, and IBP) are analysed in terms of basic and intermediate concepts. Central components of the OWL ontologies for these systems are presented, pointing out differences and similarities. The main novelty of the paper is the ontological analysis and representation in OWL of LCBR systems. The paper also emphasises the important issues concerning the representation and reasoning of intermediate concepts. (shrink)

The paper provides an OWL ontology for legal cases with an instantiation of the legal case Popov v. Hayashi. The ontology makes explicit the conceptual knowledge of the legal case domain, supports reasoning about the domain, and can be used to annotate the text of cases, which in turn can be used to populate the ontology. A populated ontology is a case base which can be used for information retrieval, information extraction, and case based reasoning. The ontology contains not only (...) elements for indexing the case (e.g. the parties, jurisdiction, and date), but as well elements used to reason to a decision such as argument schemes and the components input to the schemes. We use the Protégé ontology editor and knowledge acquisition system, current guidelines for ontology development, and tools for visual and linguistic presentation of the ontology. (shrink)

Argumentation Frameworks provide a fruitful basis for exploring issues of defeasible reasoning. Their power largely derives from the abstract nature of the arguments within the framework, where arguments are atomic nodes in an undifferentiated relation of attack. This abstraction conceals different senses of argument, namely a single-step reason to a claim, a series of reasoning steps to a single claim, and reasoning steps for and against a claim. Concrete instantiations encounter difficulties and complexities as a result of conflating these senses. (...) To distinguish them, we provide an approach to instantiating AFs in which the nodes are restricted to literals and rules, encoding the underlying theory directly. Arguments in these senses emerge from this framework as distinctive structures of nodes and paths. As a consequence of the approach, we reduce the effort of computing argumentation extensions, which is in contrast to other approaches. Our framework retains the theoretical and computational bene.. (shrink)

In common law jurisdictions, legal professionals cite facts and legal principles from precedent cases to support their arguments before the court for their intended outcome in a current case. This practice stems from the doctrine of stare decisis, where cases that have similar facts should receive similar decisions with respect to the principles. It is essential for legal professionals to identify such facts and principles in precedent cases, though this is a highly time intensive task. In this paper, we present (...) studies that demonstrate that human annotators can achieve reasonable agreement on which sentences in legal judgements contain cited facts and principles. We further demonstrate that it is feasible to automatically annotate sentences containing such legal facts and principles in a supervised machine learning framework based on linguistic features, reporting per category precision and recall figures of between 0.79 and 0.89 for classifying sentences in legal judgements as cited facts, principles or neither using a Bayesian classifier, with an overall κ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\kappa$$\end{document} of 0.72 with the human-annotated gold standard. (shrink)

Disputes over causes play a central role in legal argumentation and liability attribution. Legal approaches to causation often struggle to capture cause-in-fact in complex situations, e.g. overdetermination, preemption, omission. In this paper, we first assess three current theories of causation to illustrate their strengths and weaknesses in capturing cause-in-fact. Secondly, we introduce a semi-formal framework for modelling causal arguments through strict and defeasible rules. Thirdly, the framework is applied to the Althen vaccine injury case. And lastly, we discuss the need (...) for new criteria based on a common causal argumentation framework and propose ideas on how to integrate the current theories of causation to assess the strength of causal arguments, while also acknowledging the tension between evidence-based and policy-based causal analysis in law. (shrink)

The first issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law journal was published in 1992. This paper provides commentaries on nine significant papers drawn from the Journal’s second decade. Four of the papers relate to reasoning with legal cases, introducing contextual considerations, predicting outcomes on the basis of natural language descriptions of the cases, comparing different ways of representing cases, and formalising precedential reasoning. One introduces a method of analysing arguments that was to become very widely used in AI and Law, namely (...) argumentation schemes. Two relate to ontologies for the representation of legal concepts and two take advantage of the increasing availability of legal corpora in this decade, to automate document summarisation and for the mining of arguments. (shrink)

The task of rhetorical role labeling is to assign labels (such as Fact, Argument, Final Judgement, etc.) to sentences of a court case document. Rhetorical role labeling is an important problem in the field of Legal Analytics, since it can aid in various downstream tasks as well as enhances the readability of lengthy case documents. The task is challenging as case documents are highly various in structure and the rhetorical labels are often subjective. Previous works for automatic rhetorical role identification (...) (i) mainly used Conditional Random Fields over manually handcrafted features, and (ii) focused on certain law domains only (e.g., Immigration cases, Rent law), and a particular jurisdiction/country (e.g., US, Canada, India). In this work, we improve upon the prior works on rhetorical role identification by proposing novel Deep Learning models for automatically identifying rhetorical roles, which substantially outperform the prior methods. Additionally, we show the effectiveness of the proposed models over documents from five different law domains, and from two different jurisdictions—the Supreme Court of India and the Supreme Court of the UK. Through extensive experiments over different variations of the Deep Learning models, including Transformer models based on BERT and LegalBERT, we show the robustness of the methods for the task. We also perform an extensive inter-annotator study and analyse the agreement of the predictions of the proposed model with the annotations by domain experts. We find that some rhetorical labels are inherently hard/subjective and both law experts and neural models frequently get confused in predicting them correctly. (shrink)

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

The first issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law journal was published in 1992. This paper offers some commentaries on papers drawn from the Journal’s third decade. They indicate a major shift within Artificial Intelligence, both generally and in AI and Law: away from symbolic techniques to those based on Machine Learning approaches, especially those based on Natural Language texts rather than feature sets. Eight papers are discussed: two concern the management and use of documents available on the World Wide Web, (...) and six apply machine learning techniques to a variety of legal applications. (shrink)

A child’s death is a profound loss for mothers and affects hundreds of thousands of women. Mothers report inconsolable and progressive grief that is distinct from depression and impacts daily emotions and functions. The brain mechanisms responsible for this relatively common and profound mental health problem are unclear, hampering its clinical recognition and care. In an initial exploration of this condition, we used resting state functional MRI (fMRI) scans to examine functional connectivity in key circuits, and task-based fMRI to examine (...) brain network activity in grieving mothers in response to pictures of their deceased child and as well as recognizable deceased celebrities and unfamiliar individuals. We compared nine mothers who had lost an adult child and aged-matched control mothers with a living child of a similar age. Additionally, we collected diffusion imaging scans to probe structural connectivity and complemented the imaging studies with neuropsychological assessments. Increased functional activation in Ventral Attention/Salience Networks accompanied by a reduced activation in the medial prefrontal cortex in response to the deceased child’s picture robustly distinguished the grieving mothers from controls. Heightened resting-state functional connectivity between the paraventricular thalamic nucleus (PVT) and the amygdala distinguished the grieving mothers from the controls and correlated with subjective grief severity. Structurally, maternal grief and its severity were associated with alterations in corticolimbic white matter tracts. Finally, grieving mothers performed worse than controls on neuropsychological tests of learning, memory, and executive function, linked with grief severity. Reduced activation in cortical regions inhibiting emotions and changes in the PVT circuitry—a region involved in long-term emotional memories and decision making under conflict—distinguish grieving mothers from controls. Notably, the magnitude of neurobiological changes correlates with the subjective severity of grief. Together, these new discoveries delineate a prevalent and under-recognized mental health syndrome and chart a path for its appreciation and care. (shrink)

This book's importance is derived from three sources: careful conceptualization of teacher induction from historical, methodological, and international perspectives; systematic reviews of research literature relevant to various aspects of teacher induction including its social, cultural, and political contexts, program components and forms, and the range of its effects; substantial empirical studies on the important issues of teacher induction with different kinds of methodologies that exemplify future directions and approaches to the research in teacher induction.

Counter to the popular impression that Adam Smith was a champion of selfishness and greed, Jerry Muller shows that the Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations maintained that markets served to promote the well-being of ...

[t. 1.] 1750-1830 -- [t. 2.] 1831-1864 -- [t. 3.] 1865-1895 -- [t. 4., zesz. 1.-2.] 1896-1918.

Artykuł stanowi analizę relacji z debaty sejmowej towarzyszącej gło - sowaniu nad wprowadzeniem ustawy o warunkach dopuszczalności przerywania ciąży z 1956. Treść ustawy oraz dyskusja wokół niej stały się przyczynkiem sporów dotyczących regulacji uro - dzin. Po wprowadzeniu ustawy w życie w dyskursie dotyczącym nowego prawa partycypowali liczni autorzy, zarówno komunistyczni, jak i katoliccy. Omawiana relacja może być również po - strzegana jako przegląd chwytów retorycznych, których używało się w PRL-u w dyskusji na temat przerywania ciąży oraz stanowisk poszczególnych opcji (...) politycznych wobec tej problematyki. (shrink)

1 października 2019 roku dotychczasowa Sekcja Filozofii Przyrody, składająca się z Katedry Filozofii Przyrody, Katedry Filozofii Przyrodoznawstwa oraz Katedry Metodologii Nauk Systemowo-Informacyjnych, została przekształcona w Katedrę Filozofii Przyrody (KFP). W okresie od utworzenia Katedry Filozofii Przyrody do końca 2022 roku aktywność naukowa jej pracowników obejmowała: realizację indywidualnych i wspólnych programów badawczych i związaną z nimi działalność publikacyjną; udział w konferencjach naukowych; spotkania w celu omówienia bieżących spraw organizacyjnych; spotkania tematyczne, poświęcone prezentacji realizowanej problematyki badawczej oraz dyskusji nad prezentowanymi treściami. -------------------------- (...) Zgłoszono: 20/02/2023. Zrecenzowano: 28/03/2023. Zaakceptowano do publikacji: 30/03/2023. (shrink)

Celem artykułu jest omówienie poglądów o. prof. Stanisława Ziemiańskiego SJ dotyczących znaczenia nauk przyrodniczych dla filozofii i teologii oraz relacji między naukami przyrodniczymi, filozofią i teologią. Na tle teodycealnego stanowiska o. Ziemiańskiego, zaproponowanego w ramach jego teologii naturalnej, został zaprezentowany sposób, w jaki autor wykorzystuje dane nauk przyrodniczych w swoich poszukiwaniach filozoficznych. Ziemiański przyjmuje stanowisko, które cechuje się ostrożnością, a nawet zachowywaniem pewnego rodzaju dystansu wobec obrazu świata kreowanego przez współczesne przyrodoznawstwo. W szczególności nie podziela filozoficznej interpretacji naukowego obrazu świata, (...) która miałaby prowadzić do panewolucjonizmu rozciągniętego na całość historii wszechświata. Na tle współczesnych stanowisk licznych polskich przedstawicieli ewolucjonizmu teistycznego, wywodzących się z katolickich środowisk intelektualnych, którzy starają się uzgadniać ewolucję z kreacją na gruncie filozofii, poglądy o. Ziemiańskiego są mniej typowe i niewątpliwie wyróżniają się owym antyewolucjonistycznym rysem. Analizę stanowiska o. Ziemiańskiego rozpoczęto od rekonstrukcji jego ujęcia teoriopoznawczego i metodologicznego w zakresie dotyczącym statusu nauk przyrodniczych, filozofii i teologii oraz obrazów rzeczywistości materialnej, jakich one dostarczają. W dalszej części omówiono wybrane kwestie przedmiotowe, które mieszczą się w obszarze zagadnienia relacji między naukami przyrodniczymi i teologią, a które podejmował o. Ziemiański, w szczególności problematykę dotyczącą genezy wszechświata i pochodzenia życia biologicznego. Następnie podjęta została próba odtworzenia ogólnego obrazu relacji między nauką i religią (naukami przyrodniczymi i teologią), a także rozumem i wiarą, w związku ze sposobem ujmowania przez o. Ziemiańskiego m.in. kontrowersji kreacjonizm – ewolucjonizm, zagadnienia momentu animacji płodu ludzkiego oraz grzechu pierworodnego, cierpienia i śmierci. Na zakończenie do niektórych twierdzeń Ziemiańskiego ustosunkowano się krytycznie i polemicznie. Wspólnym mianownikiem dla tych uwag jest znaczenie wpływu przyjmowanych założeń metafizycznych na interpretację i wykorzystanie danych naukowych w tworzeniu filozoficznego i teologicznego obrazu świata. (shrink)

Taxes are closely related to the functioning of the state. From the moral and social point of view, it should always be directed towards the common good. Implementing this principle, the state supports the improvement of citizens’ welfare. Provides them with collected taxes their services, such as internal and external security, education, culture, infrastructure, social services and others. The formation of fair tax system and the mechanism of budgetary resources also has great importance because of the importance of the whole (...) economy. In addition, the state’s fiscal system applies to every citizen as a taxpayer. Therefore, this issue also has important ethical dimension of individuality. The article focuses on these issues, emphasizing an ethical perspective the following three issues: (1) The social context of contemporary reflections on the obligations to the state, (2) the state and its goals, and (3) the moral aspects of the duty to pay taxes. (shrink)