Why Doomsday Arguments are Better than Simulation Arguments

Real Arguments Are Approximate Arguments

There are a number of frameworks for modelling argumentation in logic. They incorporate a formal representation of individual arguments and techniques for comparing conflicting arguments. A common assumption for logic-based argumentation is that an argument is a pair 〈Φ, α〉 where Φ is minimal subset of the knowledgebase such that Φ is consistent and Φ entails the claim α. However, real argument...

Should Politicians Stop Using Analogies? Whether Analogical Arguments Are Better Than Their Factual Equivalents

In political argumentation, analogies are often used to convince an audience of one’s views. For example, in political debates leading up to the Iraq War, one such analogical argument was that Saddam Hussein was like Hitler and therefore Saddam should be forcibly ousted. But are all analogical arguments really convincing? In this paper we investigate whether analogical arguments are actually mo...

Preferred Arguments are Harder to Compute than Stable

Preferred Arguments are Harder to Compute than Stable Extension

Based on an abstract framework for nonmonotonic reasoning, Bondarenko et at. have extended the logic programming semantics of admissible and preferred arguments to other nonmonotonic formalisms such as circumscription, autoepisternic logic and default logic. Although the new semantics have been tacitly assumed to mitigate the computational problems of nonmonotonic reasoning under the standard s...

Randomized Arguments are Transferable

Easwaran has given a definition of transferability and argued that, under this definition, randomized arguments are not transferable. I show that certain aspects of his definition are not suitable for addressing the underlying question of whether or not there is an epistemic distinction between randomized and deductive arguments. Furthermore, I demonstrate that for any suitable definition, rand...