Il problem solving in ambiti 'ricchi di conoscenza' e 'mal definiti': il caso dei problemi giudiziari

The judge’s activity in a trial is analysed as a knowledge-rich and ill-defined problem. The analysis of knowledge-rich problems has led to the development of a research area dealing with the comparison between experts and novices in several knowledge domains, including the judicial domain. Besides being knowledge-rich problems, judicial problems are ill defined because in their initial state they do not provide all the information to solve them and often they do not allow to reach an absolutely certain solution. Different judges may therefore give different solutions to the same problem and this leads to the necessity to provide arguments to support the proposed solution. From this point of view judicial problems present some analogies with social science problems. There are, however, some peculiar features of judicial problem solving that activate specific reasoning strategies: for example, the necessity to continuously move from the fact to the law and vice versa, the necessity to examine material already worked out by others, or the fact of having to deal with two opposite versions of the same problem. These features are discussed in the paper.