Discursive Dilemma

The doctrinal paradox was first identified by legal scholars Lewis Kornhauser and Lawrence Sager in the early 1990s. Philosophers Philip Pettit and Christian List reformulated it in 2002 as the "discursive dilemma," framing it in propositional logic and distinguishing premise-based versus conclusion-based voting. Their work established judgment aggregation theory, showing how democratic voting on interconnected propositions can produce logically inconsistent collective judgments.