Arguments for exception in US security discourse

In his influential State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben proposes that, even in apparently liberal western democracies, the state will routinely use the contingency of national emergency to suspend civil liberties and justify expansion of military and police powers. We investigated rhetorical strategies deployed in the web pages of US security agencies, created or reformed in the aftermath of the 9/11 events, to determine whether they present argumentation conforming to Agamben’s model. To expose rhetorical content, we examined strategies operating at two levels within our corpus. Argument schemes and underlying warrants were identified through close examination of systematically selected core documents. Semantic fields establishing themes of threat and danger were also explored, using automatic corpus tools to expose patterns of lexical selection established across the whole corpus. The study recovered evidence of rhetoric broadly consistent with the logic predicted by State of Exception theory, but also presented nuanced findings whose interpretation required careful re-appraisal of core ideas within Agamben’s work

An Argumentation-Based Reasoner to Assist Digital Investigation and Attribution of Cyber-Attacks

We expect an increase in the frequency and severity of cyber-attacks that comes along with the need for efficient security countermeasures. The process of attributing a cyber-attack helps to construct efficient and targeted mitigating and preventive security measures. In this work, we propose an argumentation-based reasoner (ABR) as a proof-of-concept tool that can help a forensics analyst during the analysis of forensic evidence and the attribution process. Given the evidence collected from a cyber-attack, our reasoner can assist the analyst during the investigation process, by helping him/her to analyze the evidence and identify who performed the attack. Furthermore, it suggests to the analyst where to focus further analyses by giving hints of the missing evidence or new investigation paths to follow. ABR is the first automatic reasoner that can combine both technical and social evidence in the analysis of a cyber-attack, and that can also cope with incomplete and conflicting information. To illustrate how ABR can assist in the analysis and attribution of cyber-attacks we have used examples of cyber-attacks and their analyses as reported in publicly available reports and online literature. We do not mean to either agree or disagree with the analyses presented therein or reach attribution conclusions

Parsing Argumentation Structures in Persuasive Essays

In this article, we present a novel approach for parsing argumentation structures. We identify argument components using sequence labeling at the token level and apply a new joint model for detecting argumentation structures. The proposed model globally optimizes argument component types and argumentative relations using integer linear programming. We show that our model considerably improves the performance of base classifiers and significantly outperforms challenging heuristic baselines. Moreover, we introduce a novel corpus of persuasive essays annotated with argumentation structures. We show that our annotation scheme and annotation guidelines successfully guide human annotators to substantial agreement. This corpus and the annotation guidelines are freely available for ensuring reproducibility and to encourage future research in computational argumentation.Comment: Under review in Computational Linguistics. First submission: 26 October 2015. Revised submission: 15 July 201

When win-argument pedagogy is a loss for the composition classroom

Despite the effort educators put into developing in students the critical writing and thinking skills needed to compose effective arguments, undergraduate college students are often accused of churning out essays lacking in creative and critical thought, arguments too obviously formulated and with sides too sharply drawn. Theories abound as to why these deficiencies are rampant. Some blame students’ immature cognitive and emotional development for these lacks. Others put the blame of lackadaisical output on the assigning of shopworn writing subjects, assigned topics such as on American laws and attitudes about capital punishment and abortion. Although these factors might contribute to faulty written output in some cases, the prevailing hindrance is our very pedagogy, a system in which students are rewarded for composing the very type of argument we wish to avoid — the eristic, in which the goal is not truth seeking, but successfully disputing another’s argument. Certainly the eristic argument is the intended solution in cases when a clear‑cut outcome is needed, such as in legal battles and political campaigns when there can only be one winner. However, teaching mainly or exclusively the eristic, as is done in most composition classrooms today, halts the advancement of these higher‑order inquiry skills we try developing in our students

Freedom, Reason and History: The Hegelian heritage in Gadamer and Habermas.

Freedom, Reason and History: The Hegelian heritage in Gadamer and Habermas. This essay aims at an elaboration of the theme of freedom by taking into account Gadamer"s and Habermas"s appropriation of Hegel. I will approach this theme by dividing it into three main topics: 1) The question of historical reconstruction of the idea(s) of freedom, 2) The question of justification of the idea of freedom, 3) The question of application (of the idea of freedom). The question of historical reconstruction will deal with the Gadamerian appropriation of Hegel"s idea of freedom in his concept of tradition. This will be confronted with Habermas"s twofold critique against Gadamer. Habermas claims that "tradition" could not be understood in a critical, that means, freedom-oriented way. He also claims that even a critical tradition would be one of many traditions, which leads to relativism. The question of justification will deal with Habermas"s and Gadamer"s approach to Hegel"s conception of freedom through recognition. The Habermasian approach to the Hegelian theme is a non-contextualised one, thereby aiming at a non-relative foundation for critical thinking. The third topic relates to the Gadamerian and also Habermasian question of how to apply a certain (non-contextual) freedom-based concept of recognition to different contexts. These last two topics relates to a Habermasian question of how to critically examine the freedom-potentials of a given context by using "freedom through recognition" as an ideal type, or standard

Argumentation and Logic Programming for Explainable and Ethical AI

In this paper we sketch a vision of explainability of intelligent systems as a logic approach suitable to be injected into and exploited by the system actors once integrated with sub-symbolic techniques. In particular, we show how argumentation could be combined with different extensions of logic programming – namely, abduction, inductive logic programming, and probabilistic logic programming – to address the issues of explainable AI as well as to address some ethical concerns about AI

Explainable and Ethical AI: A Perspective on Argumentation and Logic Programming

In this paper we sketch a vision of explainability of intelligent systems as a logic approach suitable to be injected into and exploited by the system actors once integrated with sub-symbolic techniques. In particular, we show how argumentation could be combined with different extensions of logic programming – namely, abduction, inductive logic programming, and probabilistic logic programming – to address the issues of explainable AI as well as some ethical concerns about AI

Web-centric systems in support of argumentation, negotiation, and organizatioinal memory

The purpose of this thesis is to propose and demonstrate a new negotiation and argumentation medium. This medium will take advantage of the latest in web technologies while conducting a detailed analysis and design of a prototype web based decision support system to support on-line argumentation, claims, and team decisions. The information obtained from the application will be stored in an ODBC database, to be used as part of the organizational memory. Organization memory will significantly enhance an organizations ability to utilize historical data in conjunction with current decision making requirements. The findings in this study strongly support the strengths of the action-resource based argumentation system (ARBAS) model and indicate that future research and application development would significantly advance the fields of web-based negotiation and argumentation. A web-centric prototype developed during this research can be viewed at HTTP://WWW.CIMNET. NPS. NAVY. MIL/ THESIShttp://archive.org/details/webcentricsystem00vickCaptain, United States ArmyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited