Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Polos, L.
Author-Name-Last: Polos
Author-Name-First: Laszlo
Author-Name: Hannan, M.T.
Author-Name-Last: Hannan
Title: Reasoning with Partial Knowledge
Abstract: We investigate how sociological argumentation differs from the classical first-order logic. We focus on theories about age dependence of organizational mortality. The overall pattern of argument does not comply with the classical monotonicity principle: adding premises does not overturn conclusions in an argument. The cause of nonmonotonicity is the need to derive conclusions from partial knowledge. We identify meta-principles that appear to guide the observed sociological argumentation patterns, and we formalize a semantics to represent them. This semantics yields a new kind of logical consequence relation. We demonstrate that this new logic can reproduce the results of informal sociological theorizing and lead to new insights. It allows us to unify existing theory fragments and paves the way towards a complete classical theory.
Creation-Date: 2000-07-05
File-URL: https://repub.eur.nl/pub/34/erimrs20000705151351.pdf
File-Format: application/pdf
Series: RePEc:ems:eureri
Number: ERS-2000-30-ORG
Classification-JEL: L2, M, M10
Keywords: logic of theory building, non-monotonicity, organizational mortality respectively, social science methodology
Handle: RePEc:ems:eureri:34