Justifying Underlying Desires for Argument-Based Reconciliation

Not focusing on stakeholders’ original desires, but on their underlying desires helps agents to reconcile practical conflicts. This paper proposes a logical formalization of an argument-based reasoning for justifying both underlying desires and means for realizing them. Based on the idea that an underlying desire can be obtained by abstracting an original desire, we give a problem setting for desire abstraction in terms of sufficiency and consistency using practical syllogisms. We introduce two kinds of defeasible inference rules, called positive and negative practical abductive syllogisms, as counterparts of the practical syllogisms and show their correctness in terms of sufficiency and consistency. We give three kinds of argumentation systems structured with practical abductive syllogisms or/and practical syllogisms and show that the argumentation systems can simply handle Kowalski and Toni’s reconciliatory scenario for committee member selection and our reconciliatory scenario for business transfer.