Spurious preferences in structured argumentation: a preliminary analysis

The phenomenon of spurious preferences in argumentation can be described as an unjustified unequal treatment of some arguments emerging in a context where equal treatment would be expected. Using the ASPIC+ formalism as a basis, we provide an emblematic example of spurious preference and introduce a basic requirement of spurious preference avoidance for a suitable family of argumentation theories. We then show that a variant of ASPIC+, introduced to deal with problems concerning multiple contradictories, satisfies this requirement.