On Ambiguity and the Expressive Function of Law: The Role of Pragmatics in Smart Legal Ecosystems
This addresses the challenge of interpreting and implementing ambiguous laws in automated systems, which is incremental as it applies existing linguistic and AI concepts to the legal domain.
The paper tackles the problem of ambiguity in legal systems and its role in smart legal ecosystems, exploring how pragmatics and human-centered AI can model rules and compliance to support zero-defect manufacturing in Industry 4.0.
This is a long paper, an essay, on ambiguity, pragmatics, legal ecosystems, and the expressive function of law. It is divided into two parts and fifteen sections. The first part (Pragmatics) addresses ambiguity from the perspective of linguistic and cognitive pragmatics in the legal field. The second part (Computing) deals with this issue from the point of view of human-centered design and artificial intelligence, specifically focusing on the notion and modelling of rules and what it means to comply with the rules. This is necessary for the scaffolding of smart legal ecosystems (SLE). I will develop this subject with the example of the architecture, information flows, and smart ecosystem of OPTIMAI, an EU project of Industry 4.0 for zero-defect manufacturing (Optimizing Manufacturing Processes through Artificial Intelligence and Virtualization).