From logic to dialectics in legal argument

Abstract

This paper investigates the relation between declarative and procedural accounts of adversarial legal argument. A three-leveled model is proposed, where a formal argumentation framework is built around a logical system and itself embedded in a dialectical protocol for dispute, in such a way that, each time a party adds or retracts information, the argumentation framework reassesses the resulting state of the dispute. The proposed link between the first, logical level and an argumentation framework obviates the need for nonmonotonic logics at the first level, while the proposed link between declarative and procedural dural models of argumentation enables us to regard induction and analogy not as forms of inference but as heuristics for introducing premises.