Stephen Toulmin once observed that ‘it has never been customary for philosophers to pay much attention to the rhetoric of mathematical debate’ (Toulmin & al., 1979, p. 89). Might the application of Toulmin’s layout of arguments to mathematics remedy this oversight? Toulmin’s critics fault the layout as requiring so much abstraction as to permit incompatible reconstructions. Mathematical proofs ...

Argumentation concepts have been applied to numerous knowledge engineering endeavours in recent years. For example, a variety of logics have been developed to represent argumentation in the context of a dialectical situation such as a dialogue. In contrast to the dialectical approach, argumentation has also been used to structure knowledge. This can be seen as a non-dialectical approach. The To...

Our research is on developing artificial intelligence-based approaches to help lay audiences to understand medical and other scientific arguments. Currently, we are developing a natural language generation system that will synthesize patient-tailored genetic counseling documents. In this position paper, we focus on two forms of internal representation to be used by the system: a qualitative cau...

‘A central theme throughout the impressive series of philosophical books and articles Stephen Toulmin has published since 1948 is the way in which assertions and opinions concerning all sorts of topics, brought up in everyday life or in academic research, can be rationally justified. Is there one universal system of norms, by which all sorts of arguments in all sorts of fields must be judged, o...