Carneades and abstract dialectical frameworks: A reconstruction

Carneades is a rather general framework for argumentation. Unlike many other approaches, Carneades captures a number of aspects, like proof burdens, proof standards etc., which are of central importance, in particular in legal argumentation. In this paper we show how Carneades argument evaluation structures can be reconstructed as abstract dialectical frameworks (ADFs), a recently proposed generalization of Dung argumentation frameworks (AFs). This not only provides at least an indirect link between Carneades and AFs, it also allows us to handle arbitrary argument cycles, thus lifting a restriction of Carneades. At the same time it provides strong evidence for the usefulness of ADFs as analytical/semantical tools in argumentation.