Satisfying Rationality Postulates of Structured Argumentation Through Deductive Support -- Technical Report

2026-04-23

AI Summary

Existing structured argumentation frameworks struggle to simultaneously satisfy the five core rationality postulates—closure, direct and indirect consistency, non-interference, and crash-resistance—under credulous semantics when both undercuts and preferences are taken into account. This work proposes a novel framework, Deductive ASPIC$^{\ominus}$, which integrates the gen-rebuttals mechanism from ASPIC$^{\ominus}$ with the joint-support bipolar structure of Deductive ASPIC$-$, while incorporating preference handling. For the first time, this framework rigorously satisfies all five rationality postulates within an enhanced preferred semantics in settings that include both undercuts and preferences, thereby establishing a theoretically sound foundation and offering a new pathway toward logically robust argumentation systems.

Technology Category

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Preferences
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Other Foundations of Reasoning under Uncertainty
• Multiagent Systems: Agreement, Argumentation & Negotiation

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Fairness-aware retrieval and ranking
• Responsible Web: Consent frameworks and practices on the web

Abstract

ASPIC-style structured argumentation frameworks provide a formal basis for reasoning in artificial intelligence by combining internal argument structure with abstract argumentation semantics. A key challenge in these frameworks is ensuring compliance with five critical rationality postulates: closure, direct consistency, indirect consistency, non-interference, and crash-resistance. Recent approaches, including ASPIC$^{\ominus}$ and Deductive ASPIC$-$, have made significant progress but fall short of meeting all postulates simultaneously under a credulous semantics (e.g. preferred) in the presence of undercuts. This paper introduces Deductive ASPIC$^{\ominus}$, a novel framework that integrates gen-rebuttals from ASPIC$^{\ominus}$ with the Joint Support Bipolar Argumentation Frameworks (JSBAFs) of Deductive ASPIC$-$, incorporating preferences. We show that Deductive ASPIC$^{\ominus}$ satisfies all five rationality postulates under a version of preferred semantics. This work opens new avenues for further research on robust and logically sound structured argumentation systems.

Problem

• structured argumentation
• rationality postulates
• ASPIC
• preferred semantics
• undercuts

Innovation

• Deductive ASPIC⁻
• rationality postulates
• structured argumentation
• preferred semantics
• gen-rebuttals