Reconstructing Causal Reasoning about Evidence: a Case Study

When procedural-support systems are to be useful in practice, they should provide support for causal reasoning about evidence. Such support should be both ra- tionally well-founded and natural to the users of such systems. This article studies two possible foundations for such support, logics for defeasible argumentation and logical models of causal-abductive reasoning. A court decision about a car accident is reconstructed in the two formalisms, and the results are compared on both their ratio- nality and their naturalness. It is concluded that more research is needed to combine the strong points of the two approaches.