Responsibility for inconsistency

•A measurement for the degree of responsibility of each formula of a knowledge base for the inconsistency in that base.•A causality-based explanation of the measurement.•The logical properties of the measurement.•The complexity results for the measurement.

It is desirable to identify the degree of responsibility of each part of a knowledge base for the inconsistency of that base to make some necessary trade-off decisions on restoring the consistency of that base. In this paper, we propose a measurement for the degree of responsibility of each formula in a knowledge base for the inconsistency of that base. This measurement is given in terms of minimal inconsistent subsets of a knowledge base. Moreover, it can be well explained in the context of causality and responsibility presented by Chockler and Halpern [1].