On Ambiguity and the Expressive Function of Law: The Role of Pragmatics in Smart Legal Ecosystems

TL;DR

This paper explores ambiguity and pragmatics in law, emphasizing their importance in designing smart legal ecosystems and AI compliance, with insights from linguistics, cognitive science, and Industry 4.0 applications.

Contribution

It offers a novel interdisciplinary analysis of legal ambiguity and pragmatics, integrating linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives for smart legal ecosystem development.

Findings

Analysis of ambiguity in legal language and cognition

Framework for modeling rules in AI and human-centered design

Application to Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing ecosystems

Abstract

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).