Research report 2011 - Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods

The Logic of Conviction

Authors
Schweizer, Mark
Departments
Max Planck Research Group "Intuitive Experts"
Summary
German civil procedural law states that a judge freely forms his or her conviction on the truth of disputed factual statements. When assessing the facts of a case, a judge must hold a number of partial beliefs at the same time, some of which may be dependent on each other. So called Bayes Nets allow a graphic display of these partial beliefs and their (in)dependencies. The use of Bayes Nets forces coherence of the partial beliefs in the sense of subjective probability theory and allows testing how various assumptions influence the judge’s conviction.

For the full text, see the German version.

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