Nested Argumentation and Its Application to Decision Making over Actions

In this paper we describe a framework in which the grounds for one argument’s defeat of another is itself subject to argumentation. Hence, given two conflicting arguments, each of which defeat the other, one can then determine the preferred defeat and hence the preferred argument. We then apply this nested argumentation to selection of an agent’s preferred ‘instrumental’ arguments, where each such argument represents a plan of actions for realising an agent’s goals.