Abstract
Climate Engineering (CE) is the intentional large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system to counter climate change. CE is highly controversial, spurring global debates about whether and under which conditions it should be considered. We focus on the computer-supported analysis of a small subset of the arguments pro and contra CE interventions as presented in the work of Betz and Cacean (2012), namely those drawing on the “ethics of risk”; these arguments point out uncertainties in future deployment of CE technologies. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate and explain the application of higher-order interactive and automated theorem proving (utilizing shallow semantical embeddings) to the logical analysis of “real-life” argumentative discourse.
Supported by VolkswagenStiftung, grant Consistent, Rational Arguments in Politics (CRAP).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Ontological arguments (or proofs) are arguments for the existence of a Godlike being, common since centuries in philosophy and theology. More recently, they have attracted the attention of logicians, not only because of their interesting history, but also because of their quite sophisticated logical structures.
- 2.
Our reason for choosing a deductive approach over a defeasible one had originally a technical motivation: the base logic provided (off-the-shelf) in Isabelle/HOL is classical (monotonic). In fact, the shallow semantical embedding of non-classical object logics reuses the consequence relation (i.e. the proof methods) of the meta-logic. Embedding a non-monotonic logic in Isabelle/HOL can certainly be done (e.g. by deep embeddings or by explicit modeling of a non-monotonic consequence relation), but we are not currently pursuing such an approach, since this would be more complex from a user perspective and also take a toll on the performance of automated tools). In this respect we have chosen to treat arguments as deductions, thus locating all fallibility of an argument in its (sometimes implicit) premises.
- 3.
HOL, also known as Church’s type theory, is a logic of functions formulated on top of the simply typed lambda-calculus, which also provides a foundation for functional programming [2].
- 4.
We strive to remain as close as possible to the original argument network as introduced by Betz and Cacean [6] (with one exception concerning the dialectical relation among arguments A47, A48, A50 and A22, which will be commented upon later on). The reader will notice that some of the arguments could have been merged together. However, Betz and Cacean have deliberately decided not to do so. We conjecture that this is due to traceability concerns, given the fact that most arguments have been compiled from different bibliographic sources and authors. See [9] and [17] for a discussion on this issue.
- 5.
Notice that we will keep this same suffix convention throughout this work.
- 6.
Notice the similarly to sequents in Gentzen-type deductive systems. In fact, Isabelle/HOL’s meta-logic is based upon (higher-order) Gentzen-type natural deduction. It is also worth mentioning that our implementation in Isabelle/HOL handles arguments as (sequent-like) inferences independently from each other. This is different than having the premises for all arguments as axioms in a same theory resp. knowledge-base and drawing conclusions as theorems. In our approach, two arguments with mutually inconsistent premises will not cause any problems nor trivialize anything. In the same vein, conflicting arguments with the same explicit premises are also possible; the cause for the conflicting conclusions is to be found in additional (implicit) premises.
- 7.
Cf. Betz and Cacean’s work [6] for sources for these and other proposed theses and arguments in the CE debate.
- 8.
Notice that we use Isabelle’s keyword abbreviation to introduce these definitions as “syntactic sugar”.
- 9.
This is a prover among several others integrated into Isabelle [16].
References
Benzmüller, C.: Universal (meta-)logical reasoning: recent successes. Sci. Comput. Program. 172, 48–62 (2019)
Benzmüller, C., Andrews, P.: Church’s type theory. In: Zalta, E.N. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, summer 2019 edn. (2019)
Benzmüller, C., Paulson, L.C.: Quantified multimodal logics in simple type theory. Log. Univers. (Special Issue on Multimodal Logics) 7(1), 7–20 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11787-012-0052-y
Besnard, P., Hunter, A.: Elements of Argumentation, vol. 47. MIT Press, Cambridge (2008)
Besnard, P., Hunter, A.: Constructing argument graphs with deductive arguments: a tutorial. Argum. Comput. 5(1), 5–30 (2014)
Betz, G., Cacean, S.: Ethical Aspects of Climate Engineering. KIT Scientific Publishing, Karlsruhe (2012)
Blanchette, J.C., Nipkow, T.: Nitpick: a counterexample generator for higher-order logic based on a relational model finder. In: Kaufmann, M., Paulson, L.C. (eds.) ITP 2010. LNCS, vol. 6172, pp. 131–146. Springer, Heidelberg (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14052-5_11
Blanchette, J.C., Böhme, S., Paulson, L.C.: Extending Sledgehammer with SMT solvers. J. Autom. Reasoning 51(1), 109–128 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10817-013-9278-5
Cayrol, C., Lagasquie-Schiex, M.C.: Bipolar abstract argumentation systems. In: Simari, G., Rahwan, I. (eds.) Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence, pp. 65–84. Springer, Boston (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-98197-0_4
Davidson, D.: Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation: Philosophical Essays, vol. 2. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2001)
Dung, P.M.: On the acceptability of arguments and its fundamental role in nonmonotonic reasoning, logic programming and n-person games. Artif. Intell. 77(2), 321–357 (1995)
Dung, P.M., Kowalski, R.A., Toni, F.: Assumption-based argumentation. In: Simari, G., Rahwan, I. (eds.) Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence, pp. 199–218. Springer, Boston (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-98197-0_10
Fuenmayor, D., Benzmüller, C.: A computational-hermeneutic approach for conceptual explicitation. In: Nepomuceno-Fernández, Á., Magnani, L., Salguero-Lamillar, F.J., Barés-Gómez, C., Fontaine, M. (eds.) MBR 2018. SAPERE, vol. 49, pp. 441–469. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32722-4_25
Fuenmayor, D., Benzmüller, C.: Computational hermeneutics: an integrated approach for the logical analysis of natural-language arguments. In: Liao, B., Ågotnes, T., Wang, Y.N. (eds.) CLAR 2018. LASLL, pp. 187–207. Springer, Singapore (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7791-4_9
Janssen, T.M.V.: Montague semantics. In: Zalta, E.N. (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, spring 2020 edn. (2020)
Nipkow, T., Wenzel, M., Paulson, L.C. (eds.): Isabelle/HOL. LNCS, vol. 2283. Springer, Heidelberg (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45949-9
Prakken, H.: Modelling support relations between arguments in debates. In: Chesñevar, C., Falappa, M., Ferme, E. (eds.) Argumentation-Based Proofs of Endearment. Essays in Honor of Guillermo R. Simari on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday, pp. 349–365. College Publications, London (2018)
Acknowledgements
We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable remarks and comments, which significantly helped to improve the final version of this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Fuenmayor, D., Benzmüller, C. (2020). Computer-Supported Analysis of Arguments in Climate Engineering. In: Dastani, M., Dong, H., van der Torre, L. (eds) Logic and Argumentation. CLAR 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12061. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44638-3_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44638-3_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-44637-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-44638-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)