In this talk, which will be conceptual in nature, I will employ a problem-driven (as opposed to a formalism-driven) approach to the study of argumentation. I will first attempt to unify the main current accounts of the logical structure of arguments into a general conceptual view on that structure. I then discuss how this view accounts for argument schemes and for the handling of arguments in dialogues. Using an actual example of legal decision making I shall then argue that dialogue models of argumentation should allow for switches between different levels of abstraction. Since such switches may involve a shift to other modes of reasoning than argumentation, I will conclude that a logical account is needed of the combination of different modes of reasoning, and that the notion of argument schemes may not be sufficient to develop such an account.

Slides

In this talk, I will give a historical perspective on computational argumentation and discuss its application to commonsense conflict resolution. In the first part of the talk  I will look back at the emergence of argumentation as a distinct paradigm for defeasible reasoning. I will focus on abstract argumentation and some of its instances. In the second part of the talk I will look at the role of argumentation in decision making by applying it to the practical  problem of contract dispute resolution.  I will argue through a number of real world cases that contract dispute resolution is a two-level argumentation where at the object level, through dialogue games, the parties argue about facts and events while at the meta-level they argue about legal doctrines.  I will then point out that the current state of art of dialogue games is not sufficient for application in such practical domains and proceed to present new proposals to address some of the shortcommings.