Involvement, Detachment and Programming: The Belief in PROLOG

tags

Philip Leith Prolog Ramism

Notes

the ‘proto-idea’, a sort of rough conception or belief from the past which turns up, in an amended state, in currently accepted facts.

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view proto-ideas within Elias’s construct concerning the involvement and detachment of the individual and his or her beliefs

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we do not expect to see the ethical aspects of ‘bad blood’ return in future scientific research on syphilis, for such a return would be a step back to a more involved and less detached position.

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we cannot view either the Renaissance conception or the current conception of the logic/law thesis as being anything other than a highly involved position, and that, therefore, the belief in the utility of PROLOG must also be highly involved.

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the design of programming languages is — by its very nature — dependent upon the involvement of the designer.

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The thought pattern of the group advocating any given programming language is often moulded in unexpected, and yet social, ways.

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5.1 RAMUS AND HIS METHOD

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we can produce formalisations of the law through logical methods which offer insights into what ‘the law’ actually is.

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The fundamental fact concerning the intellectual life of New Englanders is that they ranged themselves definitely under the banner of the Ramists.

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Ramism was congenial to ‘impatient and not too profound thinkers’,

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a logical methodology with one of the most reckless means of quantification the intellectual world has ever known.

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use his logical tool to axiomatise and reorganise subjects while he was actually learning them.

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His confidence in his logical approach allowed Ramus to approach almost all areas.

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As in the present, though, one of the problems of this medieval mathematical logic was that it had little relevance to the non-philosophical general thinker or scholar; it was too philosophical and its concerns were too incestuous - of concern only to the small circle who created and manipulated its systems.

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It was not to be the technical separation of argument and reason which Aristotle had made it in his work: rather, the two were to be brought together into one system where logic and expression were intimately linked into one.

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To Aristotle, dialectic was the proper use of logic

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The main points which the humanists held against the logic of the scholastics were that it was arid, difficult and pedantic; Ramis’s charge that ‘ordinary people don’t talk like that’ perhaps sums up the criticism.

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Rhetoric, we might suggest, is best seen as ‘pleading’

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we have a ‘logic' which interrelates technical logic, dialectic and rhetoric

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Ramus’s method relies heavily on a diagrammatic technique, where the world is first divided into dichotomies and then resolved together in a dichotomous manner

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at last, on the right hand side of the page as shown in the diagram, the fundamental units, the indivisible ‘arguments’ would all be enumerated.

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all disciplines can be diagrammed in a chart of successive foliations

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in the Kowalskian legal logic project this is not the case; but, rather, that this project is closer to Fraunce’s.

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‘methodological’ arrogance (we might term it) in Fraunce’s claim 7 he states that the problem of legal obscurity does not lie with the legal forefathers per se, but the problem lies with the fact that they did not have the Ramist method.

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Fraunce was a university man (turned barrister), and was thus intimately interested in the pedagogical aspects of knowledge —-—- legal information as we might now term it: how law is to be expressed, transmitted, and so on. In the text he does not really bother with how judges should ‘think’ or ‘reason’, so long as they use the method as a means of clarifying the underlying legal epistemology

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Considering that PROLOG was relatively unknown to the computing world prior to the announcement of the Fifth Generation, the choice of that language as the basis for a national project of the scale proposed is quite a bombshell.

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logic programming can be seen as an instance of ‘method’, with close analogies with Ramist ‘method’.

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Thus, PROLOG offers nothing computationally new (we might say) but does offer something ‘interactively‘ new

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It is a barking back to the cry of Ramus where: ‘Dialectic is the art of arts and the science of sciences, possessing the way to the principles of all curriculum subjects. For dialectic alone disputes with probabilities concerning the principles of all other arts, and thus dialectic must be the first science to be acquired’.

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Imperial College, London, where Kowalski is Professor of Computational Logic. Within the academic software teaching and research group, it seems — to the outsider — that the entire department is involved in logic programming.

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the reader of research papers on logic programming and the law . will notice that almost without exception the writers have felt confident that these philosOphers of law can safely be set aside.

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while it might be thought that research into systems to handle ‘law’ would be of concern to the British ESRC (responsible for the social sciences), this project was funded by the SERC (responsible for the hard sciences).

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formalisation of the British Nationality Act

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At its inception the Act was the subject of fierce debate, partly because it introduced barriers to ‘full’ nationality to those who considered themselves to so be: for example, those resident in Hong Kong, opponents .to the Act claimed, became ‘second class’ British subjects. In the same vein, after I the FalklandsMalvinas episode the Falkland islanders‘ position was amended so that they were to be ‘proper’ British citizens.

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It was also perceived as being a highly racist piece of legislation.

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free of the complicating influence of case law

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PROLOG itself is not the ideal legal logic programming language

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Horn clause logic must be extended to allow negated conditions

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those aspects of law which might be problema- tical are omitted

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leave behind the controversies which surrounded the implementation of the Act.

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legislation is treated as being formalisablc

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no relationship made between the project and traditional jurisprudence.

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no argument over its conclusions

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problems met during the formalisation are assumed to be soluble within the logic programming frame- work

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the project is rather artificial with regard to law. There is no mention of courts, judges or the problems (related in Renton, 1975) of the drafting of legislation.

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the general world could be analysed and understood and quantified through use of a core set of rules or, to use current terminology, heuristics.

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The concept of ‘method’ is not one which is utilised by Kowalski — but nonetheless, that is what he also offers us. He provides us with a method to allow information to be held and transmitted.

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Both Ramus and Kowalski offer us the same epistemological vision; one utilised the new technique of printing whilst the other utilises the new technique of computing, yet under that technological surface their goals are identical.

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Now, we have no evidence that Kowalski believes that logic describes thought: what we do have is evidence that he believes that logic describes information.

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those in the current area of deontic logic who argue over how best to represent the concept of ‘legal obligation' which is, of course, a human value and not an attribute of abstract information.

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We have men- tioned how the logic programming researchers have omitted - discussion of law or jurisprudence from their work; and yet they have brought their logic programming epistemology to work in the legal domain. It is an attitude which is, as Turkle might suggest, strikingly imperialistic.

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Logic acts, epistemologi- cally, upon facts which arise elsewhere.

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such omissions allow logic programming to set aside any questions about the relationship of logic to knowledge,

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When we place a universal or existential quantifier in front of a logical expression, we delimit our logical world and say, in effect, we are not interested in what lies beyond those borders.

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Logicians become pedants: butterfly collec- tors of the intellectual world.

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the legal rules relating to the British Nationality Act project were first extracted from the legislation by a student of computer science: not even a student of law is required

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the old, feudal knight’s nobility was still in decline, while the new aristocracy of the absolutist courts was still in the process of formation.

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it might well be that it is an aSpect of all technocratic groups which attempt to push themselves into a higher social position, that they will use their technical worldviews as ‘method’ to carry out imperialistic invasions.

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Might the legal establishment not expect to discuss this PROLOG project in their own terms, and see it in an other than technical light?

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concerned with the questions which problems in the social sciences pose for those who attempt to investigate them with a ‘scientific’ spirit, often transferring models of scientific investigation (from the physical sciences) across to fundamentally different problem types.

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The world is seen to be a logical world which can be described and manipulated

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When mismatches between law and logic programming are met, we are told that the method requires refining and not that it is inappropriate.

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set aside as requiring a ‘smart interpreter‘, and everything will be well ‘just as soon as we figure (how to build it) out.’

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The problem then, for computing as a science, lies in becoming more and more detached in deciding just what ‘human-orientated’ actually means.

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programming languages frequently represent our view of what the world actually is

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