Abstract Debates

We introduce and study Abstract Debates, in an attempt to incorporate Dung's argumentation frameworks in a general model of social reasoning. Informally, on a shared reasons space, a society expresses a set of possibly shared forms of subjectivity, whose deeper interactions enable new consistent collective judgments, creating social inference relations. Formally, in an abstract debate each member of a society has an opinion on a set of abstract facts, that is, a pair of two disjoint subsets of agreed and disagreed facts. A semantics is a function which assigns to each abstract debate a set of possible output opinions, based only on the interactions of the individual opinions. We consider argumentative semantics providing a novel qualitative approach to social reasoning. Two other interesting semantics are discussed.