A new paper “Ignorance is not Bliss: Deontic Risk and the Asking of Questions” by Christian Straßer, Isabella Cissell, Leander Hirschsteiner and Hauke Krugmeier is forthcoming in the proceedings of AI^3. Here’s the abstract:
When reasoning with incomplete information, we often face situations where it is unclear whether the premises of certain inferences hold or whether defeaters are available. Reasoning with norms adds urgency to this problem: if you are obliged to act only if certain conditions do and others do not obtain, you should not just act without knowing whether those conditions are met. Act too quickly, and you might violate norms inadvertently. Investigate everything, and you waste resources. The real challenge is knowing when an inquiry is actually warranted: when finding out more would genuinely change what you ought to do, and when you should just act on what you already know. In this paper, we extend Argumentation Calculi (AC) to model exactly this kind of normative reasoning under uncertainty. Our extension, QuAC, adds inference rules that generate inquiry warrants and lets them compete with deontic arguments through defeasible attack relations. We evaluate the system using standard argumentation semantics, prove correspondence results between extensions and normative outcomes, and ground the design in rationality desiderata, such as affirmative openness, and the new condition of deontic relevance. The result is a formal framework that does not just compute what to do, but explains why an agent asks a question, suspends an obligation, or revises their commitments when new information arrives.