The Ontology of Legal Possibilities and Legal Potentialities

Ontologies in a legal expert system must be processed to suit all possible user cases within the field of law of the system. From the logical premises of a deductive system of express rules of law, legal ontologies may be implied to encompass the combinatorial explosion of possible cases that may lack one or more of the express antecedents in the deductive rule system. Express ontologies in inductive and abductive premises that are associated with the deductive antecedents, may also be adjusted by implication to suit the combinatorial explosion of possible cases. Implied legal ontologies may be determined to suit the user’s case and its legal consequences. The method of this determination and the processing of express black letter law accordingly, is considered by reference to the supplementation of ontology by logic and the supplementation of logic by ontology, in the legal domain; three bases of this method are discussed: law-making power, prior analytics, and the pillars of truth in science and law. Firstly, law-making authority includes the power to determine the logical category of legal premises, and legal truth tables (c.f. Wittgenstein, 1918); law is laid down as legal ontologies with logic attributes or structures. Thus, three ontological posits of law-makers provide for the logical processing of legal information. Rules of law are Major deductive premises laid down, formally or informally, as conditional propositions which may be systematised for extended deductive reasoning. Material facts in a case are laid down as inductive instances that particularise or define antecedents in rules of law; they also may be used as Minor deductive premises to determine the outcome of the case. Reasons for rules are laid down as and for strong or weak abductive reasoning. Secondly, legal knowledge engineering requires prior analytics (cf. Aristotle, 1952, originally c.335 BC ) for the acquisition of the expertise; by prior analytics, premises are formalised and systematized for automation of their associated heuristics. Legal epistemology both determines and implements logical structures; through prior analytics it uses ontologies of legal possibilities and potentialities, to comprehensively predetermine premises for its three forms of legal logic: deduction, induction and abduction. Thirdly, Lord Chancellor Bacon’s (1620) reconstruction of legal epistemology as scientific method for expanding knowledge, systematizes the sources of truth in law and science. It is here developed as a method of prior analytics for constructing an ontology of legal possibilities and legal potentialities. Such ontological construction is essential for determining the heuristics of combinatorial explosion derived from express legal rules to meet the possible cases of users; while legal experts need only construct the relevant part of the combinatorial explosion, for a client’s case, an expert system must be capable of constructing any relevant part to suit a user’s case.