Persuasive Argumentation and Epistemic Attitudes

Abstract

This paper studies the relation between persuasive argumentation and the speaker's epistemic attitude. Dung-style abstract argumentation and dynamic epistemic logic provide the necessary tools to characterize the notion of persuasion. Within abstract argumentation, persuasive argumentation has been previously studied from a gametheoretic perspective. These approaches are blind to the fact that, in reallife situations, the epistemic attitude of the speaker determines which set of arguments will be disclosed by her in the context of a persuasive dialogue. This work is a first step to fill this gap. For this purpose we extend one of the logics of Schwarzentruber et al. with dynamic operators, designed to capture communicative phenomena. A complete axiomatization for the new logic via reduction axioms is provided. Within the new framework, a distinction between actual persuasion and persuasion from the speaker's perspective is made. Finally, we explore the relationship between the two notions.

An Abstract Look at Awareness Models and Their Dynamics

“…In the modalized (multi-agent) versions, a possible world is constituted by one such graph plus the specification of which arguments and attacks each agent is aware of. This enables us to express higher-order uncertainty about awareness of arguments [35], which is in turn crucial for modelling strategic reasoning in an argumentative environment [36] and its dynamics [32,33]. In a similar vein, O-models have been applied to more structured frameworks for argumentation [13,14], with O understood as a set of ASPIC + arguments [30].…”

Influencing Choices by Changing Beliefs: A Logical Theory of Influence, Persuasion, and Deception

“…In the AI field, persuasion and related notions have been approached from different perspectives. Following seminal work on argumentation [28], persuasion has been modelled through structured argumentation [19], abstract argumentation [6,7], probabilistic argumentation [13], possibilistic belief revision [9], abstract argumentation combined with dynamic epistemic logic [20]. Some logical approaches have addressed notions related to persuasion, such as social influence [16,24], manipulation (influence on choices) [15], lying and deception [23,27], or changing other agents' degrees of beliefs [8].…”

A Simple Framework for Cognitive Planning

“…There exist also models based on possibility theory in which a piece of information is represented as an argument which can be more or less accepted depending on the trustworthiness of the agent who proposes it (Da Costa Pereira, Tettamanzi, and Villata 2011). Persuasion has also been formalized with the support of logical tools, e.g., by combining abstract argumentation with dynamic epistemic logic (DEL) (Proietti and Yuste-Ginel 2019) and epistemic logic with dynamic logic (Budzyńska and Kacprzak 2008).…”