Description of the Group

The group has been originally funded under the name Research Group for Non-Monotonic Logic and Formal Argumentation by a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation from September 2014 to September 2019. One research focus of the group is nonmonotonic logic as a formal model of defeasible reasoning. The group actively contributes research in the areas of

• formal argumentation theory
• adaptive logic
• deontic logic, and
• non-classical logic.

Since the beginning of its funding the research group has

• published over 40 papers (plus several more papers in preparation) in top journals and proceedings of highly competitive workshops and conferences (IJCAI, AAMAS, AAAI, etc.),
• published two special issues,
• organized 5 workshops in Bochum,
• organized one symposium (at CLMPS),
• held three tutorials (at ESSLLI and TRS Reasoning School, PhDs in Logic), and
• produced two excellent dissertations.

We have contributed to the study of logical foundations of formal argumentation

• in the tradition of ASPIC+ (e.g., IJCAI17, AAMAS19),
• in the tradition of ABA (e.g., AAMAS19, LPNMR19),
• in the tradition of sequent-based argumentation (e.g., TCS19, JLC19, COMMA18, LNCS17, AAMAS18, TAFA17, LNAI17, KR16),
• more general in logical argumentation (e.g., AMAI19, IFCOLOG18),
• by comparing and translating different systems (e.g., JAL18, NMR16),
• by considering hypothetical inference patterns (e.g., NMR18, COMMA18, KRR/SAC17),
• and normative reasoning (e.g., SL17, DEON16).

In each branch more works are in preparation.

We have pioneered an argumentation-based agent-based model (ArgABM) for the study of socio-epistemic aspects of scientific inquiry (EJPS19, HSR17, FoLLI17, LNAI17). It has gained significant attention from the philosophy of science community and it has been presented in over 10 invited talks by Dunja Seselja (incl. CLMPS19, Paris-Sorbonne 2019, LEAHPS 2019, MCMP Munich 2018, IZWT 2018, Vienna 2018, KIT 2018, Hannover 2016, UCL 2016, etc.).

The group turned out to be a huge success: we thank the Humboldt foundation in the trust and funding.