Tenacious Tortoises: A Formalism for Argument over Rules of Inference

As multi-agent systems proliferate and employ different and more sophisticated formal logics, it is increasingly likely that agents will be reasoning with different rules of inference. Hence, an agent seeking to convince another of some proposition may first have to convince the latter to use a rule of inference which it has not thus far adopted. We define a formalism to represent degrees of acceptability or validity of rules of inference, to enable autonomous agents to undertake dialogue concerning inference rules. Even when they disagree over the acceptability of a rule, two agents may still use the proposed formalism to reason collaboratively.