What is argumentation?

Formal argumentation is the study of how arguments attack and support each other, and which sets of arguments can stand together without contradicting themselves.

It sounds abstract, but it's the formal machinery behind auditable reasoning. When a courtroom jury decides which testimony to believe, or when a scientific review board weighs competing studies, they're doing argumentation informally. Formal argumentation gives you primitives — argument, attack, support, acceptance — that a computer can reason about.

Why it matters for scene AI

Formal argumentation gives you a structural layer for scenes: a graph of arguments and attacks, a semantics for deciding which stand. In a scene, each beat carries a record of:

• The arguments asserted by whom.
• The attacks that bound under the current scene tension.
• The acceptance semantics that produced the beat outcome.

You can replay the scene deterministically, tune one parameter (β, scene intensity) and see the beats change in a transparent way, or combine this with other tools — language models for surface prose, handwritten branches for pivotal moments. Argumentation gives you a reasoning scaffold; what you build on top is up to you.

The smallest example

Two arguments that attack each other — the Nixon diamond:

Nixon diamond

Press enter or space to select a node.You can then use the arrow keys to move the node around. Press delete to remove it and escape to cancel.

Press enter or space to select an edge. You can then press delete to remove it or escape to cancel.

attacksdrag nodes · scroll to pan

Neither argument "wins" in isolation. Dung's acceptance semantics tell you which subsets of these arguments can coherently stand together — in this case, either-or, but not both. The Nixon diamond example walks through this in detail.

In our library

• argumentation — the core Dung + ASPIC+ implementation.
• argumentation-bipolar — attack + support graph structure.
• argumentation-weighted — edge weights and β-budgets.
• argumentation-weighted-bipolar — the composition of the two.
• argumentation-schemes — Walton's 60+ presumptive argument schemes.
• encounter-argumentation — the bridge into scene AI via the encounter crate.

Further reading

Start with Dung (1995), the paper that founded the field. Then Walton, Reed & Macagno (2008) for schemes. See the reading order for a full curriculum.