The present study explored several dispositional factors associated with individual differences in lay adult’s interpretation of when an arguer is, or is not, committed to a statement. College students were presented with several two-person arguments in which the proponent of a thesis conceded a key point in the last turn. Participants were then asked to indicate the extent to which that concession implied a change in the proponent’s attitude toward any of the previous statements in the argument. Participants designated as (...) ‘liberal’ used the concession to infer substantial change in commitment to earlier statements in the argument. A group designated as ‘conservative’ were reluctant to make any such inferences. A discriminant analysis indicated that variables assessing participants’ attitudes toward argument as well as their cognitive and communication styles jointly predicted their liberal or conservative status. The discriminant function and follow-up group comparisons indicated that liberals were more likely than conservatives to engage in argument. This included a greater tendency to use argument as a source of knowledge. Liberals also employed a more sophisticated message design logic than conservatives on a communication task. The groups did not clearly differ with respect to participants’ implicit theory of argument, though trends were present that merit attention in future research. Implications of these findings for future research on lay interpretations of commitment are discussed. (shrink)

This paper reports research concerning a suitable dialogue model for human computer debate. In particular, we consider the adoption of Moore's (1993) utilization of Mackenzie's (1979) game DC, means of using computational agents as the test-bed to facilitate evaluation of the proposed model, and means of using the evaluation results as motivation to further develop a dialogue model, which can prevent fallacious argument and common errors. It is anticipated that this work will contribute toward the development of human computer dialogue, (...) and help to illuminate research issues in the field of dialectics itself. (shrink)

The research discussed in this paper concerns an investigation of logical dialogue games as a vehicle for enhanced human-computer communication. The need for a dialogue capability in computer systems is argued, and a prima facie case made for dialogue games, in particular Mackenzie's "DC", as a suitable dialogue model. Empirical work concerning DC is outlined, and strategies for adoption by the computer are presented. A user interface, software architecture and conceptualised example are discussed. The hope is that the paper will (...) help bring together two groups of workers-philosophers of dialogue and designers of computer systems-to the mutual benefit of each. (shrink)

Woods' paper “Ideals of Rationality in Dialogue” raises six problems for dialogue theory. Woods is right about the seriousness of the problems, but one school of dialogue, that stemming from the work of Charles Hamblin, avoids each of Woods' problems by using commitment instead of belief and by using only immediate logical relations. This paper summarises the reasons Hamblin's school took this course, and explains how Woods' problems are thereby avoided.

In this paper a dialogical account of begging the question is applied to various contexts which are not obviously dialogues: - reading prose, working through a deductive system, presenting a legal case, and thinking to oneself. The account is then compared with that in chapter eight of D. Walton'sBegging the Question (New York; Greenwood, 1991).

Since the work of Plaza (1989) about acts of public communication, a lot of dynamic epistemic logic systems have emerged. A general state of the art can be found in van Ditmarsch et al. (2007). Such logics model situations in which some announcements can be made and after an announcement, the situations which are incompatible with it are deleted from the model. In this paper we propose a reconstruction of the logic PAC (Public Announcement logic with Common Knowledge, see van (...) Ditmarsch et al. (2007)) through the dialogical framework. The idea of this work is to rediscover announcements as acts: acts of an arguer during an argumentative dialogue about knowledge change of agents instead of "model-modifiers". We name this reconstruction DEMAL for Dialogical Epistemic Multi-Agent Logic. (shrink)