Abstract Argumentation

In this paper we explore the thesis that the role of argumentation in practical reasoning in general and legal reasoning in particular is to justify the use of defeasible rules to derive a conclusion in preference to the use of other defeasible rules to derive a conflicting conclusion. The defeasibility of rules is expressed by means of non-provability claims as additional conditions of the rules. We outline an abstract approach to defeasible reasoning and argumentation which includes many existing formalisms, including default logic, extended logic programming, non-monotonic modal logic and auto-epistemic logic, as special cases. We show, in particular, that the 'admissibility' semantics for all these formalisms has a natural argumentation-theoretic interpretation and proof procedure, which seem to correspond well with informal argumentation. In the admissibility semantics there is only one way for one argument to attack another, namely by undermining one of its non-provability claims. In this paper, we show how other kinds of attack between arguments, specifically how rebuttal and priority attacks, can be reduced to the undermining of non-provability claims.