Higher-order Logic as Lingua Franca -- Integrating Argumentative Discourse and Deep Logical Analysis
This work addresses the problem of integrating argumentative discourse analysis with deep logical reasoning for researchers in computational logic and argumentation theory, representing an incremental advancement by building on existing embedding techniques.
The paper tackles the challenge of deeply analyzing argumentative discourse by using classical higher-order logic as a uniform framework to encode both logical structures and dialectical interactions, demonstrated through an analysis of a climate engineering debate. It also introduces novel language-theoretical foundations for characterizing shallow semantical embeddings of non-classical logics, leading to more concise and elegant characterizations.
We present an approach towards the deep, pluralistic logical analysis of argumentative discourse that benefits from the application of state-of-the-art automated reasoning technology for classical higher-order logic. Thanks to its expressivity this logic can adopt the status of a uniform \textit{lingua franca} allowing the encoding of both formalized arguments (their deep logical structure) and dialectical interactions (their attack and support relations). We illustrate this by analyzing an excerpt from an argumentative debate on climate engineering. Another, novel contribution concerns the definition of abstract, language-theoretical foundations for the characterization and assessment of shallow semantical embeddings (SSEs) of non-classical logics in classical higher-order logic, which constitute a pillar stone of our approach. The novel perspective we draw enables more concise and more elegant characterizations of semantical embeddings of logics and logic combinations, which is demonstrated with several examples.