The paper argues that a satisfactory explanation of a logic program must take the form of an argument, rather than a proof. This can only be done on the basis of information regarding the role of the various literals in the bodies of the clauses, which is normally not captured by such programs. A schema for arguments, derived from Toulmin, is presented, and the components of this schema are rel...

Learning can be engaged by dialectic, that is, by identifying pros and cons that inhere in propositions, and more generally, by raising questions about the validity of claims. We report here on a classroom case study of dialectical constructivist pedagogy: Students created dialectical analyses of two lectures and four books as core activities in a freshman seminar ‘‘Information, People and Tech...

In practical reasoning, knowledge is often used to argue, in various ways, for or against an assertion. This perspective on knowledge has led a number of researchers to apply insights from argumentation theories to modelling reasoning. However, argumentation theories have been applied to the development of intelligent systems based in a variety of ways. For example, the most commonly used struc...

Negotiation and public participation are a key aspect of present urban development projects. Argumentation support tools, based on the Toulmin logic, have often been presented as a way to increase the accountability of the debates between the different urban actors. It should still be assumed that any collaborative decision making requires some common culture to make the dialogue possible and c...

Human intelligence resides in our continually displayed cognitive skills, such as inference, learning, planning or searching, rather than in some static treasure house of accumulated knowledge. Hence, the logical structure of cognitive activities themselves is at least as important as that of their propositional or otherwise encoded products. This general epistemological view has a long philoso...

The recent burgeoning interest in Enterprise Architecture and its focus on artifact driven methods is taken as a motivation for the re-appraisal of Peter Naur’s notion of “programming as theory building”. Naur strongly disputes the value of the role and orientation of the IS discipline around artifacts and argues that algorithmic methods do not lead to a theory of a domain. Such a viewpoint pro...