Alejandro Garcia

Desde el punto de vista sociológico, una de las ambivalencias más visibles de la crisis de la modernidad consiste en la persistencia de la violencia en las sociedades civilizadas y su constante presencia a lo largo de todo el proceso de modernización. Este artículo realiza, en primer lugar, una exposición de los argumentos de Elias sobre estas cuestiones y los denominados “procesos de decivilización”. Posteriormente, se muestran las revisiones críticas que ha recibido, así como las reelaboraciones conceptuales recientes sobre este tema que permiten una comprensión más fecunda de esta “cara oculta” de la Modernidad

In abstract argumentation, each argument is regarded as atomic. There is no internal structure to an argument. Also, there is no specification of what is an argument or an attack. They are assumed to be given. This abstract perspective provides many advantages for studying the nature of argumentation, but it does not cover all our needs for understanding argumentation or for building tools for supporting or undertaking argumentation. If we want a more detailed formalization of arguments than is available with abstract argumentation, we can turn to structured argumentation, which is the topic of this special issue of Argument and Computation. In structured argumentation, we assume a formal language for representing knowledge and specifying how arguments and counterarguments can be constructed from that knowledge. An argument is then said to be structured in the sense that normally, the premises and claim of the argument are made explicit, and the relationship between the premises and claim is formally defined (for instance, using logical entailment). In this introduction, we provide a brief overview of the approaches covered in this special issue on structured argumentation.

Information-seeking interactions in multi-agent systems are required for situations in which there exists an expert agent that has vast knowledge about some topic, and there are other agents (questioners or clients) that lack and need information regarding that topic. In this work, we propose a strategy for automatic knowledge acquisition in an information-seeking setting in which agents use a structured argumentation formalism for knowledge representation and reasoning. In our approach, the client conceives the other agent as an expert in a particular domain and is committed to believe in the expert’s qualified opinion about a given query. The client’s goal is to ask questions and acquire knowledge until it is able to conclude the same as the expert about the initial query. On the other hand, the expert’s goal is to provide just the necessary information to help the client understand its opinion. Since the client could have previous knowledge in conflict with the information acquired from the expert agent, and given that its goal is to accept the expert’s position, the client may need to adapt its previous knowledge. The operational semantics for the client-expert interaction will be defined in terms of a transition system. This semantics will be used to formally prove that, once the client-expert interaction finishes, the client will have the same assessment the expert has about the performed query.