Abstract

This paper aims at laying some foundations of a logic of argumentation in which arguments, as well as attacks and supports among arguments are all defined in a unifying formalism. In the latter, an argument is denoted as a pair displaying a reason and a conclusion but no condition is required to hold relating the reason to the conclusion. We introduce a series of inference rules relating arguments and show how the resulting system captures important features of argumentation that hitherto have not been captured by existing formalisms.