Argumentation for Practical Reasoning: An Axiomatic Approach

An argument system could be viewed as a pair of a set of argument and a binary attack relation between arguments. The semantics of argumentation rests on the acceptability of arguments and the structure of arguments and their attack relations. While there is a relatively good understanding of the acceptability of arguments, the same can not be said about their structure and attack relations. In this paper, we present an axiomatic analysis of the attack relations of rule-based argument systems by presenting a set of simple and intuitive properties and showing that they indeed determine an uniquely defined common attack relations for rule-based argument systems.