Persuasive Political Argument

In this paper we discuss how a computational version of argumentation involving practical reasoning can be applied to the domain of e-democracy. We discuss our previous work which proposed an argument scheme and associated critical questions to make use of presumptive reasoning in order to justify a proposal for action. We explain how this proposal can be made computational for use by BDI agents and we illustrate the approach with an example application of a recent political debate involving the Government’s justification of a proposed action. We then go on to discuss some interesting issues arising from the example regarding the strength of the arguments and how they can be accrued to put forward a more convincing case for justifying the action. We also examine how this application compares with a previously implemented system which makes use of the same underlying theory.