Reasoning with Partial Knowledge

We investigate how sociological argumentation differs from 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 overturns conclusions in an argume...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sociological methodology 2002-01, Vol.32 (1), p.133-181
Main Authors: Pólos, László, Hannan, Michael T.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Chain rule
Endowments
Immunity
Intensionality
Knowledge
Logic
Logical theorems
Mortality
Nonmonotonic logic
Partial knowledge
Predicates
Principles
Reasoning
Semantics
Sociological methodology
Sociological theory
Sociology
Tools for Theory Building
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Summary:We investigate how sociological argumentation differs from 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 overturns conclusions in an argument. The cause of nonmonotonicity is the need to derive conclusions from partial knowledge. We identify metaprinciples 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 it paves the way toward a complete classical theory.
ISSN:0081-1750
1467-9531
DOI:10.1111/1467-9531.00114