Burden of Proof, Presumption and Argumentation

Abstract

The notion of burden of proof and its companion notion of presumption are central to argumentation studies. This book argues that we can learn a lot from how the courts have developed procedures over the years for allocating and reasoning with presumptions and burdens of proof, and from how artificial intelligence has built precise formal and computational systems to represent this kind of reasoning. The book provides a model of reasoning with burden of proof and presumption, based on analyses of many clearly explained legal and non-legal examples. The model is shown to fit cases of everyday conversational argumentation as well as argumentation in legal cases. Burden of proof determines (1) under what conditions an arguer is obliged to support a claim with an argument that backs it up and (2) how strong that argument needs to be to prove the claim in question.

Profiles of Dialogue for Repairing Faults in Arguments from Expert Opinion

“…Typical cases are ones where the source cited is not really an expert at all, or where the expert is not named, or where the source is an expert in the field different from the one that matches the topic or fits the field of expertise matching the subject domain of the proposition at issue [24,27]. The critical questions are specially designed to repair the fault encountered in these kinds of cases by indicating the gap that needs to be filled in the argumentation scheme for the premises to support the conclusion.…”

“…In short, as an argument from expert opinion is put forward and critically questioned by someone who is skeptical about it, there is a shifting back and forth of the burden of proof from one side to the other. The dialectical procedure is one in which critical questions are asked and answered [27].…”

“…An evaluation of a given instance of an argument from expert opinion, such as might take place in a legal examination of an expert witness in a trial, must take the form of a dialogue, a sequence of pro and con arguments [4,27]. Such a dialogue is represented normatively by a sequence of speech acts representing the arguments put forward and the counterarguments responding to them in a given case.…”

“…37-38], where it was used to provide a model of the fallacy of many questions. It has also been shown in [21,27] how it can model shifts in a burden of proof and presumptions arising from them. Profiles of dialogue were described by Krabbe [11] as 'tree-shaped descriptions of sequences of dialectic that display the various ways a reasonable dialogue could proceed'.…”

“…37-38] first used the profiles technique as an argumentation tool 1 , applying it to the fallacy of many questions. Krabbe [11] applied it to relevance criticisms, Walton [25] to arguments from ignorance, Krabbe [12] to equivocation criticisms, and Krabbe [12], Van Eemeren et al [21] and Walton [27] to studying shifts in burden of proof and presumptions arising from them.…”