Confronting value-based argumentation frameworks with people’s assessment of argument strength

BODANZA, G.; FREIDIN, E.

Argument & Computation

Taylor & Francis Online

Año: 2023 vol. 14 p. 247 - 273

1946-2166

We reported a series of experiments carried out to confront the underlying intuitions of value-based argumentation frameworks (VAFs) with the intuitions of ordinary people. Our goal was twofold. On the one hand, we intended to test VAF as a descriptive theory of human argument evaluations. On the other, we aimed to gain new insights from empirical data that could serve to improve VAF as a normative model. The experiments showed that people’s acceptance of arguments deviates fromVAF’s semantics and is rather correlated with the importance given to the promoted values, independently of the perceptions of argument interactions through attacks and defeats. Furthermore, arguments were often perceived as promoting more than one value with different relative strengths. The individuals also tended to analyze a given scenario taking into account external factors such as biases and arguments not explicit in the framework. Finally, we confirmed that objective acceptance, that is, the acceptance of arguments under any order of the values, was not a usual behavior of the individuals, who tended to accept only the arguments that promoted the values they subscribe.