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namely they turn out to be contradictory. Situations like these actually occurred in
the deliberative practice of the US Supreme Court (Kornhauser and Sager
1993
),
and it is important to understand what type of conflict is peculiar to those situations.
In such cases, being members of the court, the judges accepted to solve possible
divergences by voting by majority. Hence, the procedure to settle possible conflicts
of opinions was clearly accepted by every member of the group. Nevertheless,
the outcome of the procedure turned out to be in contrast with some very basic
principles of rationality. This is the specific type of conflict that our model aims to
capture.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Sect.
2.2
, we shall
introduce some basic elements of SCT and present the cases of group conflict that
we want to treat. In Sect.
2.3
, we focus on judgment aggregation, a recent area in
SCT, and we present it as a general theory for aggregating propositional attitudes.
Judgment aggregation will provide the formal basis for presenting the peculiar
notion of group conflict that we are going to analyze. In Sect.
2.4
, we present the
elements of our analysis of groups and conflicts. Section
2.5
capitalizes on the
conceptual methodology of the previous sections and presents a taxonomy of group
conflicts. Our conceptual analysis can be considered a preliminary step towards the
integration of a taxonomy of conflict into a foundational ontology such as
DOLCE
(Masolo et al.
2003
). Section
2.6
concludes and points at some future applications.
In particular, we believe that our approach is particularly useful if implemented in
complex socio-technical systems (Emery and Trist
1960
), as conflicts may show
up between various types of heterogeneous information, possibly originating both
from humans and artificial devices. The abstract level of representation that we
pursue in this paper can therefore deal with information coming from heterogeneous
sources, thus it can be applied to model the rich informational entanglement that
characterizes socio-technical systems.
2.2
SCT: An Informal Presentation
The seminal result in SCT has been provided by Kenneth Arrow's investigation of
paradoxes in
preference aggregation
, namely the problem of aggregating a number
of individual conflicting preferences into a social preference. Suppose that three
parties in a parliament (label them 1, 2, and 3) have conflicting preferences over
three possible alternative policies:
a
: “promote workers' salaries” ,
b
: “decrease
entrepreneurs' taxation”, and
c
: “increase unemployment benefits”. Suppose agents'
preferences can be represented by the following rankings of the options. Mathe-
matically, preferences are assumed to be linear orders, thus individual preferences
are supposed to be
transitive
: if an agent prefers
x
to
y
and
y
to
z
, then she/he
should prefer
x
to
z
;
irrefelexive
: an agent does not prefer
x
over
x
; and
complete
:
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