Bart Verheij, from the AI department at the University of Groningen is visiting us for a couple of days. He is delivering a seminar on Waking Up from the Logical Dream, Or: Argumentation as a Content-Driven Activity at 12 noon today in Wolfson.

Waking Up from the Logical Dream, Or: Argumentation as a Content-Driven Activity – Bart Verheij

Imagine yourself being in court, having to defend your innocence of a serious crime. Let’s suppose that your defense fails, and you end up behind bars. Was it your – probably imperfect – control of the logic of argumentation that made you lose? Or, was the problem more a matter of content, for instance, your unconvincing alibi, or lack of knowledge of the law?

This talk will use the recent advances in the logic of argumentation as a starting point, continuing to the hard issue of understanding how much logic is helpful for argumentation. In the talk, the issue is addressed from the perspectives of argumentation software and of argumentation schemes. It will become clear that Toulmin’s research agenda (dating from the 1950s) is still relevant.

Prof. Andrew Ravenscroft from the Learning Technology Research Institute at London Metropolitan University is visiting the group today. He will be delivering a seminar entitled, The thinking web? Designing tools and mashups for cyber-argumentation today at 12 noon in Wolfson.

This talk will review over a decade of design-based research that has: investigated the relationship between argumentation and thinking in learning contexts; and, designed digital tools that model argumentation and support its practice. This Learning Sciences approach to learning interaction design centres around the notion of ‘dialogue games’. This is a paradigm that can be used analytically or prescriptively to further or understanding of dialectical dialogue processes and how these can be

modelled and promoted for educational purposes.

The talk will emphasise: our work in applied computational linguistics that originally investigated and modelled educational argumentation; the design and evaluation of deployable dialogue game tools, on a relatively large-scale, that arose out of the computational modelling; and, present

our ongoing work that is synthesising dialogue game technologies and ideas with SOA and social software approaches – to realise accessible and widespread mashups, or ‘eco-systems’, for cyber-argumentation.

Finally, I will reflect on and open up the discussion about where this work might be taking us in terms of future web-technologies and related digital practices, reflecting on questions such as “What sort of

thinking do we need, by man and machines, in the 21C?”