Abstract
In practical reasoning for decision-making, agents often need to provide reasonable explanations for taking a particular action. In some contexts, such as legal contexts, they also need to choose between potential explanation schemes. Arguably, an adequate explanation should not only provide the reason as to why an argument is defensible but also specify the necessary support relations, such as warrants. Some existing argumentation theories have considered this requirement and can deal with practical reasoning. However, most of them only provide attack relations explicitly in the argumentation framework for argument evaluation, or mainly consider support relations at an abstract level without giving the definition of how to obtain them. Therefore, aiming to provide explanations for the results of practical reasoning, we refer to critical questions in argumentation schemes for practical reasoning, existing structured argumentation systems, as well as bipolar argumentation frameworks. Inspired by these theories, the current paper presents an argumentation theory considering argument structures and obtaining abstract argumentation frameworks that explicitly show both support and attack relations among arguments. In addition, we discuss some criteria for selecting desired explanations, especially under legal contexts.
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Notes
- 1.
We write \( \psi =-\varphi \) when \( \psi =\lnot \varphi \) or \( \varphi =\lnot \psi \).
- 2.
Considering that we may need to take more than one action to achieve a goal, the consequent is not defined as a single formula.
- 3.
so that \( B=A_{1}\), \(\ldots \), \(A_{n}\) \(\Rightarrow \psi _1, \ldots , \psi _m\).
- 4.
‘minimal/maximal’: both w.r.t. set-inclusion.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the anonymous reviewers of CLAR 2023 for their helpful comments. This paper is supported by two National Social Science Foundation of China (No. 20 &ZD047, 21 &ZD065).
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Yu, Z., Lu, Y. (2023). A Structured Bipolar Argumentation Theory for Providing Explanations in Practical Reasoning. In: Herzig, A., Luo, J., Pardo, P. (eds) Logic and Argumentation. CLAR 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14156. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40875-5_10
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