Argument Invention with the Carneades Argumentation System

Abstract

Argument invention (inventio) has traditionally been regarded as one of the five main components of rhetoric, but has remained an ambiguous, vague and highly contested concept, made even more confusing by its dependence on the Aristotelian topics, supposedly the places in which the rhetorical persuader can find arguments useful to support or attack a claim. The advent of two recently developed computational tools for argument invention, the Carneades Argumentation System and IBM’s Watson Debater tool, calls for a rethinking of the notion of argument invention in line with the state of the art of formal and computational argumentation systems in artificial intelligence. The role of argumentation schemes is an important part of this investigation into argument invention.