Relevance in Structured Argumentation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how structured argumentation systems maintain relevance, ensuring conclusions are unaffected by irrelevant information, through syntactic and semantic criteria, enhancing robustness in non-monotonic reasoning.

Contribution

It analyzes properties of structured argumentation that support relevance desiderata using both syntactic and semantic approaches, bridging relevance logic and argumentation theory.

Findings

Structured argumentation can satisfy relevance criteria.

Semantic and syntactic relevance conditions are compatible.

Relevance properties improve robustness of argumentation systems.

Abstract

We study properties related to relevance in non-monotonic consequence relations obtained by systems of structured argumentation. Relevance desiderata concern the robustness of a consequence relation under the addition of irrelevant information. For an account of what (ir)relevance amounts to we use syntactic and semantic considerations. Syntactic criteria have been proposed in the domain of relevance logic and were recently used in argumentation theory under the names of non-interference and crash-resistance. The basic idea is that the conclusions of a given argumentative theory should be robust under adding information that shares no propositional variables with the original database. Some semantic relevance criteria are known from non-monotonic logic. For instance, cautious monotony states that if we obtain certain conclusions from an argumentation theory, we may expect to still obtain the same conclusions if we add some of them to the given database. In this paper we investigate properties of structured argumentation systems that warrant relevance desiderata.