It is often necessary and reasonable to justify preferences before reasoning from them. Moreover, justifying a preference ordering is reduced to justifying the criterion that produces the ordering. This paper builds on the well-known ASPIC+ formalism to develop a model that integrates justifying qualitative preferences with reasoning from the justified preferences. We first introduce a notion of preference criterion in order to model the way in which preferences are justified by an argumentation framework. We also adapt the notion of argumentation (...) theory to build a sequence of argumentation frameworks, in which an argumentation framework justifies preferences that are to underlie the next framework. That is, in our formalism, preferences become not only an input of an argumentation framework, but also an output of it. This kind of input-output process can be applied in the further steps of argumentation. We also explore some interesting properties of our formalism. (shrink)

In this paper, we devise a network that consists of argumentation schemes and critical questions that participants in debates can use to easily construct arguments that attack or support former arguments. As a prototype, we build a potential network of argumentation schemes and critical questions with a practical reasoning scheme at its center. The usefulness of a NASCQ in constructing and reconstructing complex arguments and in formal argumentation is also explored along with argumentation more broadly.

In this paper, we devise a network that consists of argumentation schemes and critical questions that participants in debates can use to easily construct arguments that attack or support former arguments. As a prototype, we build a potential network of argumentation schemes and critical questions with a practical reasoning scheme at its center. The usefulness of a NASCQ in constructing and reconstructing complex arguments and in formal argumentation is also explored along with argumentation more broadly.