Doug Walton, who died in January 2020, was a prolific author whose work in informal logic and argumentation had a profound influence on Artificial Intelligence, including Artificial Intelligence and Law. He was also very interested in interdisciplinary work, and a frequent and generous collaborator. In this paper seven leading researchers in AI and Law, all past programme chairs of the International Conference on AI and Law who have worked with him, describe his influence on their work.

This paper compares the features and methods of the two leading implemented systems that offer a tool for helping a user to find or invent arguments to support or attack a designated conclusion, the Carneades Argumentation System and the IBM Watson Debater tool. The central aim is to contribute to the understanding of scholars in informal logic, rhetoric and argumentation on how these two software systems can be useful for them. One contribution of the paper is to explain to these (...) potential users how the two tools are applicable to the task of inventing arguments by using some simple illustrative examples. Another is to redefine the structure of argument invention as a procedure. (shrink)

What role, if any, does dialectic play in Aristotle’s epistemology in the Topics? In this paper I argue that it does play a role, but a role that is independent of endoxa. In the first section, I sketch the case for thinking that dialectic plays a distinctively epistemological role—not just a methodological role, or a merely instrumental role in getting episteme. In the second section, I consider three ways it could play that role, on two of which endoxa play at (...) least a co-starring role. But in the third section, I argue that endoxa don’t play that co-starring role, by arguing for a deflationary account of what endoxa are. For that reason, the third view emerges as the most plausible; but the third view is, I’ll suggest, Platonic. (shrink)

In this paper we describe the impact that Walton’s conception of argumentation schemes had on AI and Law research. We will discuss developments in argumentation in AI and Law before Walton’s schemes became known in that community, and the issues that were current in that work. We will then show how Walton’s schemes provided a means of addressing all of those issues, and so supplied a unifying perspective from which to view argumentation in AI and Law.

Hamblin distinguished between formal and descriptive dialectic. Formal normative models of deliberation dialogue have been strongly emphasized as argumentation frameworks in computer science. But making such models of deliberation applicable to real natural language examples has reached a point where the descriptive aspect needs more interdisciplinary work. The new formal and computational models of deliberation dialogue that are being built in computer science seem to be closely related to some already existing and very well established computing technologies such as problem (...) solving and decision making, but whether or how dialectical argumentation can be helpful to support these systems remains an open question. The aim of this paper is to examine some real examples of argumentation that seem to hover on the borderlines between deliberation, problem solving and decision making. (shrink)