Argumentation and decision making

This paper summarises our position on the use of symbolic methods for reasoning under uncertainty, and argumentation in particular. Our view is that argumentation offers a complement to numerical methods for reasoning about belief, and a general framework within which many competing approaches can be understood. In applications we have found that argumentation offers a variety of benefits for practical reasoning systems. The paper is historical, emphasising the reasons which motivated the development of the argumentation framework, drawing primarily on work carried out by researchers at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund over the last fifteen years