Principles for Assumptions Generation in Enthymeme-Based Dialogue

Abstract

In enthymeme-based dialogues, involved participants create assumptions in order to decode arguments from the exchanged enthymemes. This work introduces the concept of assumptions operator, which formalizes the mechanism for generating these assumptions, and proposes a set of principles to guide the construction of these operators. Said principles are inspired by Grice’s Maxims of Conversation, as well as Govier’s ARG conditions for cogent arguments. Then, in order to analyze how the used operator influences the dialogue and how that dialogue differs from the one in which the original argument is sent, we propose a framework to compare both scenarios, the former being the enthymemic one and the latter the complete one. Finally, we formally show that if the used assumptions operator complies with a set of the aforementioned principles, then most arguments in the complete dialogue have their counterpart in the enthymemic one. Furthermore, we show that under certain conditions, the enthymemic dialogue preserves some semantic properties from the complete one, specifically: conflict-freeness, acceptability and admissibility.