3 ms·

I'm curious, why would it be impossible to define the concept of legal contract formally ?

• tsimionescu 6y ago
  Try it and it will quickly become apparent. Most of the concepts we work with are fuzzy and dependent on many implicit understandings that are very hard to formalize in satisfying manner. In particular, a contract must be willingly entered by the participants, which in itself is a very hard to formalize concept (e.g. if I am dying of hunger and believe that my only chance of eating is to enter this contract, am I willingly accepting it or am I being compelled? How is this different from someone putting a gun to my head and telling me to sign?) Note that what I'm thinking of here is a formal definition that is rigorous enough to be able to apply formal mathematical methods to reason about it.