Tech Reports

ULCS-01-009

The Possibility of Arguability: Combining Multiple Arguments on the same Topic

Peter McBurney and Simon Parsons

Abstract

Building on earlier work using dialectical argumentation to represent uncertainty, we consider how the results of different debates on the same topic may be combined coherently. The different debates may be considered as arising under different scenarios about the world. We define a class of uncertainty measures to represent the extent to which a proposition is supported across these alternative scenarios, and we explore their formal properties. Our approach may be considered as expressing the possibility of arguability, analogous to the probability of provability.

Keywords: Argumentation, Scenarios, Uncertainty Formalisms.

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