Value-based argumentation

Value-based argumentation is concerned with recognising, accounting for, and reasoning with, the social purposes promoted by agents’ beliefs and actions. Value-based argumentation frameworks extend Dung’s abstract argumentation frameworks by ascribing an additional property to arguments, representing the values they promote, and recognising audiences. Values are ordered according to the preferences of an audience (different audiences will have different preferences) and an attack is successful only if the value of the attacked argument is not preferred to its attacker by its audience. Arguments can be related to values through the use of an argumentation scheme, thus enabling us to structure value-based argumentation. We describe the motivation of valuebased argumentation, its formal description and properties, the argumentation scheme and its associated critical questions and some of the applications to which value-based argumentation has been put