Enumerating preferred extensions: A case study of human reasoning

Abstract

This paper seeks to better understand the links between human reasoning and preferred extensions as found within formal argumentation, especially in the context of uncertainty. The degree of believability of a conclusion may be associated with the number of preferred extensions in which the conclusion is credulously accepted. We are interested in whether people agree with this evaluation. A set of experiments with human participants is presented to investigate the validity of such an association. Our results show that people tend to agree with the outcome of a version of Thimm’s probabilistic semantics in purely qualitative domains as well as in domains in which conclusions express event likelihood. Furthermore, we are able to characterise this behaviour: the heuristics employed by people in understanding preferred extensions are similar to those employed in understanding probabilities.