Presumptions, Assumptions, and Presuppositions of Ordinary Arguments

Plumer, Gilbert

doi:10.1007/s10503-016-9419-1

“…In other words, we go straight for the interpretation that seems most relevant and logical within the given context (Hobbs et al, 1993). Although any incomplete argument can be completed in different ways (Plumer, 2016), it is assumed that certain knowledge is shared between the arguing parties (Macagno and Walton, 2014, p. 180).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Argument Reasoning Comprehension Task: Identification and Reconstruction of Implicit Warrants

Habernal¹,

Wachsmuth²,

Gurevych³

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter Of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Hu

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Reasoning is a crucial part of natural language argumentation. To comprehend an argument, one must analyze its warrant, which explains why its claim follows from its premises. As arguments are highly contextualized, warrants are usually presupposed and left implicit. Thus, the comprehension does not only require language understanding and logic skills, but also depends on common sense. In this paper we develop a methodology for reconstructing warrants systematically. We operationalize it in a scalable crowdsourcing process, resulting in a freely licensed dataset with warrants for 2k authentic arguments from news comments. 1 On this basis, we present a new challenging task, the argument reasoning comprehension task. Given an argument with a claim and a premise, the goal is to choose the correct implicit warrant from two options. Both warrants are plausible and lexically close, but lead to contradicting claims. A solution to this task will define a substantial step towards automatic warrant reconstruction. However, experiments with several neural attention and language models reveal that current approaches do not suffice.

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“…In other words, we go straight for the interpretation that seems most relevant and logical within the given context (Hobbs et al, 1993). Although any incomplete argument can be completed in different ways (Plumer, 2016), it is assumed that certain knowledge is shared between the arguing parties (Macagno and Walton, 2014, p. 180).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Argument Reasoning Comprehension Task: Identification and Reconstruction of Implicit Warrants

Habernal,

Wachsmuth,

Gurevych

et al. 2017

Preprint

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Reasoning is a crucial part of natural language argumentation. To comprehend an argument, one must analyze its warrant, which explains why its claim follows from its premises. As arguments are highly contextualized, warrants are usually presupposed and left implicit. Thus, the comprehension does not only require language understanding and logic skills, but also depends on common sense. In this paper we develop a methodology for reconstructing warrants systematically. We operationalize it in a scalable crowdsourcing process, resulting in a freely licensed dataset with warrants for 2k authentic arguments from news comments. 1 On this basis, we present a new challenging task, the argument reasoning comprehension task. Given an argument with a claim and a premise, the goal is to choose the correct implicit warrant from two options. Both warrants are plausible and lexically close, but lead to contradicting claims. A solution to this task will define a substantial step towards automatic warrant reconstruction. However, experiments with several neural attention and language models reveal that current approaches do not suffice.

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“…Ullmann-Margalit (1983) studies presumptions (presumed facts) within the deliberation framework and treats them as conclusions of (practical) reasoning. Rescher emphasizes that specific presumptions are taken to be true for pragmatic reasons, due to the cost-effective principle (presumptive rule) that they rest upon Plumer (2017). argues that presumptions are components of arguments, either their assumptions or presuppositions, and are inherently based on conventional rules.…”

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confidence: 99%

Presumptions, and How They Relate to Arguments from Ignorance

Bodlović

¹

2019

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By explaining the argument from ignorance in terms of the presumption of innocence, many textbooks in argumentation theory suggest that some arguments from ignorance might share essential features with some types of presumptive reasoning. The stronger version of this view, suggesting that arguments from ignorance and presumptive reasoning are almost indistinguishable, is occasionally proposed by Douglas Walton. This paper explores the nature and limits of the stronger proposal and argues that initial presumptions and arguments from ignorance are not closely connected. There are three main reasons. First, the argument from ignorance, unlike typical presumptive reasoning, is a negative kind of inference. Second, the typical initial presumption is sensitive to a broader set of defeaters and thus assumes a higher (negative) standard of acceptability. Third, in dialectical terms, initial presumption and argument from ignorance bring different attacking rights and obligations. I conclude that Waltonian intuition is unsupported or, at best, is limited only to practical presumptions and practical arguments from ignorance.

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Presumptions, Assumptions, and Presuppositions of Ordinary Arguments

Cited by 11 publications

References 23 publications

The Argument Reasoning Comprehension Task: Identification and Reconstruction of Implicit Warrants

The Argument Reasoning Comprehension Task: Identification and Reconstruction of Implicit Warrants

The Argument Reasoning Comprehension Task: Identification and Reconstruction of Implicit Warrants

Presumptions, and How They Relate to Arguments from Ignorance

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