Evaluating and selecting arguments in the context of higher order uncertainty

Abstract

Human and artificial reasoning has to deal with uncertain environments. Ideally, probabilistic information is available. However, sometimes probabilistic information may not be precise or it is missing entirely. In such cases we reason with higher-order uncertainty. Formal argumentation is one of the leading formal methods to model defeasible reasoning in artificial intelligence, in particular in the tradition of Dung's abstract argumentation. Also from the perspective of cognition, reasoning has been considered as argumentative and social in nature, for instance by Mercier and Sperber. In this paper we use formal argumentation to provide a framework for reasoning with higher-order uncertainty. Our approach builds strongly on Haenni's system of probabilistic argumentation, but enhances it in several ways. First, we integrate it with deductive argumentation, both in terms of the representation of arguments and attacks, and in terms of utilizing abstract argumentation semantics for selecting some out of a set of possibly conflicting arguments. We show how our system can be adjusted to perform well under the so-called rationality postulates of formal argumentation. Second, we provide several notions of argument strength which are studied both meta-theoretically and empirically. In this way the paper contributes a formal model of reasoning with higher-order uncertainty with possible applications in artificial intelligence and human cognition.