Reconstructing Causal Reasoning about Evidence: a Case Study

Abstract

When procedural-support systems are to be useful in practice, they should provide support for causal reasoning about evidence. Such support should be both rationally well-founded and natural to the users of such systems. This article studies two possible foundations for such support, logics for defeasible argumentation and logical models of causal-abductive reasoning. A court decision about a car accident is reconstructed in the two formalisms, and the results are compared on both their rationality and their naturalness. It is concluded that more research is needed to combine the strong points of the two approaches.