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Posts Tagged ‘Argumentation’

Positions Open in PhD Program in Argumentation Theory

Posted in Announcements, Seminar/Workshop/Program Announcements, tagged , , , , , , on April 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

2 positions are now open for a 4-year PhD programme at the ArgLab, Institute of Philosophy of Language, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, in the domain of political and legal argumentation. The programme is meant to include international cooperation, first of all within the ArguPolis framework developed by the University of Lugano and their partners.

Funding is secured through a grant received by the Institute from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and should not be affected by the current financial volatility in Portugal.

Deadline for applications: May 31st, 2011.
Start of the programme: September 1st, 2011.

Details can be found here:
http://www.arglab.ifl.pt/arglab-events/2011/4/12/2-phd-positions-4-years-open-at-arglab.html
and here:
http://www.fcsh.unl.pt/investigacao/bolsas/programa-de-doutoramento-internacional-argumentation-and-communication-instituto-de-filosofia-da-linguagem-ifl/view

(Many thanks to Marcin Lewinsky and the ARGTHRY mailing list for this announcement)

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New Journal: Electronic Journal of Integrated Studies in Discourse and Argumentation

Posted in Announcements, Argumentation, CFP, Discourse Analysis, News, tagged , , , , on April 9, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Electronic Journal of Integrated Studies in Discourse and Argumentation

From the EID&A home page:

Linked to the Department of Arts and Literature of Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz, the Journal EID&A – Electronic Journal of Integrated Studies in Discourse and Argumentation – arises from a mission to contribute to the dissemination of studies located in the interface between Discourse Analysis and Argumentation. Thus, papers submitted to this Scientific Committee should be taken on the perspective of studies that comprise the argumentation in the process of constructing meaning in discourse and in the utterance situation. The goal is to promote discussion of theoretical objects or analysis of these discursive practices in society.

Call for Papers

The first issue EID&A will gather papers which focus precisely on the essence, problems and prospects from the interface between Discourse Analysis and Argumentation.

The journal EID&A – Electronic Journal of Integrated Studies in Discourse and Argumentation – invites researchers to contribute with papers focused on the discussion about the nature, problems and prospects of the interface between the Discourse Analysis and the Argumentation.

The Journal EID&A is going to publish papers, translations and reviews. For more details, authors must consult the rules for submissions of papers, available on the website www.uesc.br/revistas/eidea/english.

The deadline for submission of papers will end on July 1st, 2011. The first edition of the EID&A is awaited to September 2011.

Read the original announcement via the Analysis and Discourse wiki here.

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Workshop Announcement and Call for Papers: CMNA 2011

Posted in CFP, Computation, Connections, Seminar/Workshop/Program Announcements, tagged , , , , , , , on March 30, 2011| Leave a Comment »

2011 Workshop in Computational Models of Natural Argument

The 2011 CMNA workshops will be held concurrently with the 25th AAAI Conference in San Francisco, CA,  August 7-11.

Description

The series of CMNA workshops, since its inception in 2001, has been acting to nurture and provide succor to the ever growing community working in “Argument and Computation”. AI has witnessed a prodigious growth in uses of argumentation throughout many of its subdisciplines: agent system negotiation protocols that demonstrate higher levels of sophistication and robustness; argumentation-based models of evidential relations; groupwork tools that use argument to structure interaction and debate; computer-based learning tools that exploit monological and dialogical argument structures in designing pedagogic environments; decision support systems that build upon argumentation theoretic models of deliberation to better integrate with human reasoning

The CMNA workshop series has seen a notable growth in submissions, and forms a complement to more recent series or events, like the ArgMAS series, begun in 2004, and the nascent COMMA series, which held its first meeting in 2006. CMNA keeps a broader, interdisciplinary emphasis on natural (real) arguments and the computational tools and techniques for modeling, manipulating and exploiting them. (more…)

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Pinker on Individual vs. Mutual Knowledge

Posted in Connections, Discussion, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on March 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »

This lovely little RSA animation featuring linguist Sephen Pinker should be interesting for theorists of argument on multiple levels.  Such explanations as Pinker’s bear directly on how we take on enthymemes, how we think about dialectical guidelines, how we think about the practice of argumentation in general, etc.  I could go on, but instead I’ll let the charming video do the work*:

Direct Link: YouTube – RSA Animate – Language as a Window into Human Nature.

*Those who have heard me prattle on about David Lewis’s Convention in the recent past are hereby excused, but should watch anyway because of how cool these RSA animate thingies are. 🙂

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Scottish Argumentation Day

Posted in Announcements, Connections, Seminar/Workshop/Program Announcements, tagged , , , , on February 16, 2011| 2 Comments »

Scottish Argumentation Day

The 2011 Scottish Argumentation Day will take place at the University of Aberdeen on the 4th of March in Room A31 of the Taylor Building (lunch will be provided). Scotland contains a number of world leading centres for argumentation research, and the purpose of the day is to bring together students, post-doctoral researchers and established scientists from these groups  to discuss their work, obtain feedback on it, and forge new collaborations.

The format of the day will depend on those attending. However, it is envisioned that participants will be invited to give brief presentations, followed by informal discussion sessions in the afternoon.

The event is free to all, and  anyone with an interest in argumentation is welcome to attend. If you are interested in coming along, or for further details, please contact Nir Oren (n.oren at abdn.ac.uk).

Dr. Nir Oren
Department of Computing Science
University of Aberdeen
AB24 3UE

http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~niroren/

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New Site on Argument Mapping

Posted in Teaching, tagged , , , , on July 10, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Browsing the Argumentation Blog today turned up this announcement of an interesting website devoted to argument mapping, created by argument mapping guru Tim van Gelder.  The site is aimed at university level educators, and offers a kind of clearinghouse of information and resources on the subject of argument mapping, including links to trial versions of van Gelder’s mapping software.  I’ve added the link to the “Other Resources” section here on RAIL (see the right hand column near the end), but thought that it might be of enough interest to warrant an announcement here too given that summer is the time that many of us prepare for our Fall teaching obligations.

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Stations: Argumentation Around the Web, vol.1

Posted in Connections, Discussion, tagged on May 21, 2010| 5 Comments »

What do you do when you’re too busy to write a blog post?  You link to great posts that others have written, of course!   To weakly atone the fact that I am, in fact, being consumed by my current research obsessions, I shall therefore take this opportunity to launch a new occasional feature here on RAIL: “Stations”, a sort-of-monthly (or so) digest of the neat, cool, and generally click-worthy among recent articles and blog posts about argumentation.  Suggestions and additions in the comments are always welcome! Though argumentation is the focus, I’ll also be including posts from blogs about other issues and disciplines that I think are relevant (or at least that have potentially interesting connections) to the study of argumentation.  Here are some of the more interesting posts of the last couple of months that deal with argumentation or argumentation-related themes.  Without further ado then, here are the selections for this go around:

Argumentics: The Problems of Irony Part I and Part II

A really interesting and insightful look at irony and its uses in rhetoric from our good neighbor blog just across the street. Do check it out. Then stay and browse around see how great the rest of the blog is too.

Between Citizens and Scientists: The David/Goliath Fallacy

Jeanne Goodwin here puts her finger on a fallacy whose time I think has clearly come.  The dynamic she aptly names here is pervasive in politics, and in my (perhaps not so humble after all) view, is worth a lot of study.

These next three aren’t centrally about argumentation, but I think they have interesting applications that make them worthy of a look.

Less Wrong: Short Studies on Excuses

After a description of a few short hypothetical cases the author of the piece goes on to draw some lessons about rule-following, deviations from rule-following, and excuses.  Those of you out there working in a pragma-dialectic vein may find these observations interesting.

Bad Science: Evidence Based Smear Campaigns

Ben Goldacre is a doctor and an occasional writer for the Guardian in the UK who focuses his blog on issues around science reporting.  His blog is typically well written and might be generally interesting to those who attend to the rhetoric of science.  This particular post is of more general interest, however, as it discusses recent research from a political science journal in the UK that suggests that being corrected on our facts can actually reinforce the original (erroneous) belief targeted by the correction.  If this is true, it does seem to pose a pragmatic problem of some importance for at least some modes of communication.

Predictably Irrational: The Long-Term Effects of Short-term Emotions

And lastly there is this entry from the blog of behavioral economist Dan Ariely.  While it isn’t, strictly speaking, about argumentation, I think it contains observations of interest to those who study argumentation from a game-theoretic or strategic perspective.  In this post, Ariely reports on an experiment the results of which suggest that people will often choose more costly strategies than they need to because those strategies inflict damage on others who are seen to be in need of punishment for some transgression.  Tu quoque anyone?

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Computational Models of Natural Argument

Posted in CFP, tagged , , , , , , on April 12, 2010| Leave a Comment »

CMNA X

The 10th International Workshop on
Computational Models of Natural Argument
in association with ECAI 2010

www.cmna.info/CMNA10

16 August 2010
Lisbon, Portugal

AIMS AND SCOPE

The series of workshops on Computational Models of Natural Argument is continuing to attract high quality submissions from researchers around the world since its inception in 2001. Like the past editions, CMNA 10 acts to nurture and provide succor to the ever growing community working on Argument and Computation, a field developed in recent years overlapping Argumentation Theory and Artificial Intelligence.

AI has witnessed a prodigious growth in uses of argumentation throughout many of its subdisciplines: agent system negotiation protocols that demonstrate higher levels of sophistication and robustness; argumentation-based models of evidential relations and legal processes that are more expressive; groupwork tools that use argument to structure interaction and debate; computer-based learning tools that exploit monological and dialogical argument structures in designing pedagogic environments; decision support systems that build upon argumentation theoretic models of deliberation to better integrate with human reasoning; and models of knowledge engineering structured around core concepts of argument to simplify knowledge elicitation and representation problems. Furthermore, benefits have not been unilateral for AI, as demonstrated by the increasing presence of AI scholars in classical argumentation theory events and journals, and AI implementations of argument finding application in both research and pedagogic practice within philosophy and argumentation theory.

The workshop focuses on the issue of modelling “natural” argumentation. Naturalness may involve, for example, the use of means which are more visual than linguistic to illustrate a point, such as graphics or multimedia; or the use of more sophisticated rhetorical devices, interacting at various layers of abstraction; or the exploitation of “extra-rational” characteristics of the audience, taking into account emotions and affective factors.

Contributions are solicited addressing, but not limited to, the following areas of interest:

  • The characteristics of natural arguments: ontological aspects and cognitive issues.
  • The use of models from informal logic and argumentation theory, and in particular, approaches to specific schools of thought developed in informal logic and argumentation.
  • Rhetoric and affect: the role of emotions, personalities, etc. in models of argumentation.
  • The roles of licentiousness and deceit and the ethical implications of implemented systems demonstrating such features.
  • The linguistic characteristics of natural argumentation, including discourse markers, sentence format, referring expressions, and style.
  • Persuasive discourse processing (discourse goals and structure, speaker/hearer models, content selection, etc.).
  • Language dependence and multilingual approaches.
  • Empirical work based on corpora looking at these topics are especially welcomed.
  • Non-monotonic, defeasible and uncertain argumentation.
  • Natural argumentation and media: visual arguments, multi-modal arguments, spoken arguments.
  • Models of argumentation in multi-agent systems inspired by or based upon theories of human argument.
  • Empirically driven models of argument in AI and Law.
  • Evaluative arguments and their application in AI systems (such as decision support and advice giving).
  • Issues of domain specificity, and in particular, the independence of argumentation techniques from the domain of application.
  • Applications of computer supported collaborative argumentation, in realistic domains in which argument plays a key role, including pedagogy, e-democracy and public debate.
  • Applications of argumentation based systems, including, for example, the pedagogical, health-related, political, and promotional.
  • Methods to better convey the structure of complex argument, including representation and summarisation.
  • Tools for interacting with structures of argument, including visualisation tools and interfaces supporting natural, stylised or formal dialogue.
  • The building of computational resources such as online corpora related to argumentation.

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Workshop co-chairs:
Chris Reed, University of Dundee, UK
Floriana Grasso, University of Liverpool, UK
Nancy Green, University of North Carolina Greensboro, USA

This year’s programme committee is to be confirmed, but will be similar to the PC for 2009:

Leila Amgoud, IRIT, France
Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool, UK
Guido Boella, University of Turin, Italy
Karl Branting, The MITRE Corporation, Hanover, MD
Giuseppe Carenini, University of British Columbia, Canada
Chrysanne DiMarco, University of Waterloo, Canada
Tom Gordon, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Berlin, Germany
Marco Guerini, FBK-IRST, Trento, Italy
Helmut Horacek, Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken Germany
Anthony Hunter, University College London, UK
David Moore, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK
Fabio Paglieri, ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy
Vincenzo Pallotta, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Cécile Paris, CSIRO, Sydney, Australia
Paul Piwek, Open University, UK
Henry Prakken, Universities of Utrecht and Groningen, The Netherlands
Sara Rubinelli, University of Lucerne, Switzerland
Patrick Saint-Dizier, IRIT-CNRS, Toulouse, France
Oliviero Stock, ITC-IRST, Trento, Italy
Doug Walton, University of Windsor, Ontario
Simon Wells, University of Dundee, UK
Adam Wyner, King’s College, London, UK

SUBMISSIONS

The workshop encourages submissions in three categories:

  • Long papers, either reporting on completed work or offering a polemic discussion on a burning issue (up to 10 pages)
  • Short papers describing work in progress (up to 5 pages)
  • Demonstration of implemented systems: submissions should be accompanied by written reports (up to 3 pages). Authors should contact the organisers to ensure suitable equipment is available.

It is highly recommended to submit papers using the final camera-ready formatting style specified in the ECAI style guide (except for the number of pages) available at http://ecai2010.appia.pt/

Paper submission will be handled by the Easychair conference system: please visit http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cmna10

Deadline for long papers submission:   9 May  2010
Deadline for short papers submission:  6 June 2010
Notification to authors:              14 June 2010
Camera-ready version:                 26 June 2010

CMNA 10:                     Monday 16 August 2010

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit a revised version for the Routledge/Taylor & Francis journal, Argument and Computation.

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Snopes, Authority and Objectivity

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Informal Logic, News, Rationality, tagged , , , , , on April 6, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Upon opening my e-mail this morning I found a forward of this article from the New York Times on the popular fact-checking website snopes.com. I found the article interesting for more than a few reasons.

What has always fascinated me about Snopes is how it evolved organically online out of a felt need for objectivity. Since the beginning the web has always been a fertile breeding ground for rumors, urban legends and half-truths, and people (who I think are more sophisticated than we often believe) know this.  They are well aware of the multiple, conflicting biases that color the information they find online.  They know that these biases can lead to slanting and distortion, and to some degree they expect it.  For those who are not simply looking for confirmation of their own viewpoints, this is a problem.  Simply knowing that bias abounds on the web, however, is not a sufficient defense.  People with this kind of interest don’t want just any story, they want the story.  They want to know what really happened.  The multiple, conflicting accounts available online don’t tell them that.  The result is that people who want to use the web for information gathering purposes have to have some way of sifting the facts out of the voluminous chaff of rumor, exaggeration, and partisan cheerleading in which they lay hidden.

Enter Snopes, which as the article explains, evolved into its role as a “fact-checking” site.  (It did not start out that way.)  Nevertheless, it is now regarded by many as an authority on which stories are and are not credible on the web.

To my mind two things stand out from the article. The first is this quote:

For the Mikkelsons, the site affirms what cultural critics have bemoaned for years: the rejection of nuance and facts that run contrary to one’s point of view.

“Especially in politics, most everything has infinite shades of gray to it, but people just want things to be true or false,” Mr. Mikkelson said. “In the larger sense, it’s people wanting confirmation of their world view.”

(more…)

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Does Arguing Make Us Better Reasoners?

Posted in Connections, Discussion, Rationality, tagged , , , on March 15, 2010| 2 Comments »

Apparently the gang over at Less Wrong think so, and they’ve got a paper that backs them up.  From the blog:

Mercier and Sperber argue that, when you look at research that studies people in the appropriate settings, we turn out to be in fact quite good at reasoning when we are in the process of arguing; specifically, we demonstrate skill at producing arguments and at evaluating others’ arguments.

Interesting stuff, especially given that by ‘argument’ here Mercier and Sperber, the paper’s authors, intend the attempt to persuade, not to rationally convince.  In a nutshell, their contention is that we reason better when we are trying to persuade others to adopt our point of view. Conversely, when we aim at the truth we do worse at being reasonable.  Hmmm.  🙂

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