Rational versus Intuitive Outcomes of Reasoning with Preferences: Argumentation Perspective

Abstract

Reasoning with preference information is a common human activity. As modelling human reasoning is one of the main objectives of AI, reasoning with preferences is an important topic in various fields of AI, such as Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR). Argumentation is one particular branch of KR that concerns, among other tasks, modelling common-sense reasoning with preferences. A key issue there, is the lack of consensus on how to deal with preferences. Witnessing this is a multitude of proposals on how to formalise reasoning with preferences in argumentative terms. As a commonality, however, formalisms of argumentation with preferences tend to fulfil various criteria of 'rational' reasoning, notwithstanding the fact that human reasoning is often not 'rational', yet seemingly 'intuitive'. In this paper, we study how several formalisms of argumentation with preferences model human intuition behind a particular common-sense reasoning problem. More specifically, we present a common-sense scenario of reasoning with rules and preferences, complemented with a survey of decisions made by human respondents that indicates an 'intuitive' solution, and analyse how this problem is tackled in argumentation. We conclude that most approaches to argumentation with preferences afford a 'rational' solution to the problem, and discuss one recent formalism that yields the 'intuitive' solution instead. We argue that our results call for advancements in the area of argumentation with preferences in particular, as well as for further studies of reasoning with preferences in AI at large.