This paper provides a logically precise analysis of agreement and disputes in dialogue. The semantics distinguishes among the public commitments of each dialogue agent, including commitments to relational speech acts or rhetorical relations (e.g., Narration, Explanation, Correction). Agreement is defined to be the shared entailments of the agents’ public commitments. We show that this makes pre...

Since its inception in 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has arbitrated trade disputes between its members in part by deciding whether unilateral actions by its 134 member nations such as trade bans or restrictions violate international free trade rules and authorizing penalties against members that are found to be noncompliant with such rules. The WTO is criticized by those who believe ...

Networked systems are the driving force of modern business and commerce, underpinned by ideas such as agile enterprises, holonic manufacturing, and dynamic real-time supply chains. On occasions, the system operation will be sub-optimal or non-ideal, and disputes will occur between independent partners. It may be undesirable to resolve such disputes by recourse to law; preferably, the parties in...

Thousands of autonomous systems (ASes) cooperate with each other to provide global Internet connectivity. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is currently the only inter-domain routing protocol deployed on the Internet. It allows ASes to select and propagate routes based on flexible and locally defined policies. However, the flexibility and freedom of policies can lead to routing instability, eve...

Two Party Immediate Response Disputes (TPI-disputes) are one class of dialogue or argument game in which the protagonists take turns producing counter arguments to the ‘most recent’ argument advanced by their opponent. Argument games have been found useful as a means of modelling dialectical discourse and in providing semantic bases for proof theoretic aspects of reasoning. In this article we c...

Two–Party Immediate Response Disputes (TPI-disputes) are a dialogue game formalism providing a sound and complete proof scheme for credulous reasoning in argument systems. In earlier work it has been shown that this dialogue protocol can be interpreted as a proof calculus with which to establish unsatisfiability of propositional formula presented in CNF, and that viewed thus, the number of ‘mov...

This Section examines the features and premises of mediation that are commonly adopted for the resolution of intra-family disputes between samesex partners.1 It is argued here that the analysis of the nature of disputes and the recourse to mediation for same-sex partners adds new momentum to the study of family mediation. However, differences in the processes of family mediation as between same...

This article investigates to what extent protocols for dynamic disputes, i.e., disputes in which the information base can vary at different stages, can be justified in terms of logics for defeasible argumentation. First a general framework is formulated for dialectical proof theories for such logics. Then this framework is adapted to serve as a framework for protocols for dynamic disputes, afte...