Premise Independence in Judgment Aggregation

Abstract

Judgment aggregation studies how agent opinions on logically
interconnected propositions can be mapped into a collective judgment
on the same propositions, and is plagued by impossibility results.
In this paper we study the central notion of independence in
these impossibility results. First, we argue that the distinction
between the premises and conclusions play an important role in the
benchmark examples of judgment aggregation. Second, we consider the
notion of independence in judgment aggregation frameworks, and we
observe that the distinction between premises and conclusion is not
taken into account. Third, based on our analysis, we introduce
independence assumptions that distinguish premises from conclusion.
We show that, by introducing new operators that satisfy our independence assumptions, the problematic impossibility results no longer hold.