Contribution to the ECA Symposium on Argument Strength

I contributed to the Symposium on Argument Strength at the recent Third European Conference on Argumentation (ECA). The symposium was organised by Frank Zenker and other contributions were from to Marcin Selinger, Kamila Debowska-Kozlowska, and David Godden. Each delegate focussed upon a specific conception of argument strength from the perspective of a different analytical or modelling approach to Argumentation. Frank presented the Bayesian and probabilistic approach, Marcin a structural approach, Kamila the experimental/empirical approach, and David, the dialectical approach. My own contribution was to consider the computational approach. The linked slides cover my own part of the presentation and discussion only. To provide a focal point for the analysis we all analysed the same source text, this 3 Quarks Daily article by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse about “Epicureans on Squandering Life”. We were also luck enough, on the day, to ahve Scott within the audience for the symposium and he, as expected, provided some pithy and entertaining commentary during the discussion session.

• Slides
• Paper Abstract