Towards a Formal Framework for Motivated Argumentation and the Roots of Conflict

In computational argumentation, values adjudicate between conflicting arguments, where values hold of an argument as a whole rather than of any constituent parts; preference rankings between values determine the winning argument. We propose a novel formal framework towards an account for motivated reasoning, which is the widespread, natural observation that an agent constructs (instantiated) arguments from those propositions which are a selective subset of the set of all available propositions; and more specifically, an agent selects those propositions which accord with their values; as such, the propositions and arguments indirectly reflect an agent’s values. Conflicts between arguments are grounded in conflicts between the values associated with the constituent propositions rather than with the arguments per se.