Abstract
It would be idle to suggest that lawyers have not asked themselves questions either about the ontological or about the epistemological basis of their discipline. Yet it is tempting to say that these questions have become pressing from a technical point of view only since the arrival of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and expert systems research. Before these new concerns appeared, ontology and epistemology were, it might be argued, merely aspects of ideology and philosophy; they were not fundamental concerns of legal science because legal science was not, in the end, a real science. Law was simply the product either of its own history or of some special branch of logic concerned with, for example, deontics or rhetoric. Even if this is a somewhat simplistic view, it is fair to say not only that the modern world is still largely ignorant, despite a millennium of Roman legal scholarship, of the habits of mind and thought processes of the Roman jurists themselves1, but that epistemological models of legal reasoning still find themselves trapped within a particular knowledge assumption. That assumption is that legal knowledge is to be found only in propositional rules.
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Samuel, G. (1995). Ontology and Dimension in Legal Reasoning. In: Bankowski, Z., White, I., Hahn, U. (eds) Informatics and the Foundations of Legal Reasoning. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8531-6_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8531-6_8
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