Diagnosis and decision making in normative reasoning

Diagnosis theory reasons about incomplete knowledge and only considers the past. It distinguishes between violations and non-violations. Qualitative decision theory reasons about decision variables and considers the future. It distinguishes between fulfilled goals and unfulfilled goals. In this paper we formalize normative diagnoses and decisions in the special purpose formalism DIO(DE)2 as well as in extensions of the preference-based deontic logic PDL. The Diagnostic and DEcision-theoretic framework for DEontic reasoning DIO(DE)2 formalizes reasoning about violations and fulfillments, and is used to characterize the distinction between normative diagnosis theory and (qualitative) decision theory. The extension of the preference-based deontic logic PDL shows how normative diagnostic and decision-theoretic reasoning - i.e. reasoning about violations and fulfillments - can be formalized as an extension of deontic reasoning.

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