Metalevel argumentation

The abstract nature of Dung’s theory of argumentation accounts for its wide-spread application as a general framework for various species of non-monotonic reasoning, and, more generally, reasoning in the presence of conflict. In this article, we formalize reasoning about argumentation within the Dung argumentation paradigm itself. A metalevel Dung argumentation framework is itself instantiated by arguments that make statements about arguments, their interactions, and their evaluation in an object-level argumentation framework.We show how Dung’s theory, and object-level extensions of Dung’s theory, such as those intended to accommodate preferences, can then be uniformly characterised by metalevel argumentation in a Dung framework. We then discuss how this provides for application of the full range of theoretical and practical developments of Dung’s theory, to extensions of Dung’s theory, and provides for integration and further augmentation of these extensions.