Gustavo A. Bodanza

Sets or frequencies? How to help people solve conditional probability problems

Since the 1970s, the Heuristics and Biases Program in Cognitive Psychology has shown that people do not reason correctly about conditional probability problems. In the 1990s, however, evolutionary psychologists discovered that if the same problems are presented in a different way, peoples performance greatly improves. Two explanations have been offered to account for this facilitation effect: the natural frequency hypothesis and the nested-set hypothesis. The empirical evidence on this debate is mixed. We review the literature pointing out some methodological issues that we take into account in our own present experiments. We interpret our results as suggesting that when the mentioned methodological problems are tackled, the evidence seems to favour the natural frequency hypothesis and to go against the nested-set hypothesis.

Two approaches to the problems of self-attacking arguments and general odd-length cycles of attack

Fil: Bodanza, Gustavo Adrian. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas. Centro Cientifico Tecnologico Conicet - Bahia Blanca; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur; Argentina

Social Argument Justification: Some Mechanisms and Conditions for Their Coincidence

In this paper we analyze the problem of aggregating different individual argumentation frameworks over a common set of arguments in order to obtain a unique socially justified set of arguments. This can be done in two different ways: a social attack relation is built up from the individual ones, and then is used to produce a set of justified arguments, or this set is directly obtained from the sets of individually justified arguments. Our main concern here is whether these two procedures can coincide or under what conditions this could happen. To deal with this, we consider different voting by quota mechanisms, and the aggregation mechanisms by decisive sets.

Collective argumentation: A survey of aggregation issues around argumentation frameworks

Fil: Bodanza, Gustavo Adrian. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas. Centro Cientifico Tecnologico Conicet - Bahia Blanca. Instituto de Investigaciones Economicas y Sociales del Sur. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Economia. Instituto de Investigaciones Economicas y Sociales del Sur; Argentina

Beyond admissibility: accepting cycles in argumentation with game protocols for cogency criteria

Fil: Bodanza, Gustavo Adrian. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Humanidades; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas. Centro Cientifico Tecnologico Conicet - Bahia Blanca. Instituto de Investigaciones Economicas y Sociales del Sur. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Economia. Instituto de Investigaciones Economicas y Sociales del Sur; Argentina

Rethinking specificity in defeasible reasoning and its effect in argument reinstatement

Abstract The principle of reinstatement governing most argument systems states that an argument is reinstated when all its defeaters are in turn ultimately defeated. Nevertheless, some criticisms to this principle have been offered in the literature. We found that problems arise when arguments in a chain of attacks are related by specificity: when non-maximally specific arguments are reinstated, fallacious justifications are originated. Particularly, we show how the problem affects DeLP, a system that combines a specificity-based defeat criterion with a reinstatement-based warrant process. Following old intuitions by philosopher Carl Hempel we rethink the concepts role within defeasible argumentation. Two kinds of specificity defeaters are identified: proper defeaters and cautious defeaters. While proper defeaters are well-known, cautious defeaters are formally introduced here. A system combining cautious and proper defeaters is defined as an extension of DeLP, and dialectic warrant games are proposed for filtering out non-maximally specific arguments.