Research

Ongoing research projects related to argumentation theory. Let others know about your project by submitting the required information here!

ONGOING PROJECTS

Name of the project: The Normativity of Multimodal Arguments (code used by Dutch Science Foundation: 406.23.FHR.013)

This research project is about multimodal communication tools, and how they are used online to convince people of political views, for example. Can a photo or a video express an argument? If so, how do we judge it as a good or a bad argument? We work towards recommendations on the appropriate use of non-verbal communication tools on social media.

• PI(s): Jan Albert van Laar
• Start & end date: 01/08/2025–30/07/2030
• Budget: 830 000 €
• Funding Agency: Dutch Science Foundation (NWO)
• Country: The Netherlands
• Website of the project: https://sites.google.com/rug.nl/multimodal/home

Name of the project: From Scandal to Normalization: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations of Hate Speech in Contemporary Public Discourse

The project deals with a systematic and interdisciplinary analysis of hate speech, with a focus on soft hate speech. Over the past decade, there has been a noticeable increase in concern over the spread of hate speech in public discourse, as confirmed by numerous reports from international organizations such as OHCR (2013), UNHCR (2016), and ECRI (2017). Recent scientific research also warns that a real threat lies in soft hate speech which remains beyond the reach of legal frameworks, yet significantly contributes to the spread of discrimination and intolerance (Assimakopoulos et al., 2017; Serafis, 2021, 2022, 2023; Dominguez-Armas et al., 2023; Mohammed, 2024).
As part of the project, the phenomenon of hate speech will first be addressed theoretically from linguistic, stylistic, rhetorical, political science, historical, and legal perspectives. This will be followed by an analysis of Croatian public discourse and a comparison with international trends. The third phase will involve empirical research on citizens’ perceptions of hate speech. Based on the findings, educational materials and policy recommendations will be developed to prevent and sanction hate speech, as well as to promote non-violent communication in public space.

• PI(s): Gabrijela Kisicek
• Start & end date: 01/10/2025–30/09/2029
• Budget: 60 000€
• Funding Agency: EU Next Generation
• Country: Croatia

Name of the project: “Argumentative practices and the pragmatics of reasons 2”. PID2022-136423NB-I00

Theories of argument might opt for either inferencism or reasonism. Inferencist theories of argument present themselves as theories of inference. Reasonist theories of argument are conceived of as theories focused on the dialogical construction of reasons. From a reasonist perspective, arguing is presenting something to someone as a reason for something else, and a good argument is the one that offers a good reason for that something else. The Research Project adopts the reasonist perspective. As a consequence, the conceptual distinctions and definitions of the theory of reasons must be founded upon the practices that significantly consist of asking for, giving and examining reasons. The four general objectives of the project are: 1) studying the dialogical construction of reasons; 2) exploring the consequences of holism (the thesis that the strength and orientation of an argument depend on factors that are not themselves part of the argument); 3) exploring the consequences of particularism (the thesis that the possibility of arguing does not depend on the existence of general inference principles connecting premises and conclusions); 4) studying the processes of the construction of reasons and the evaluation of arguments as part of specific argumentative practices situated in particular contexts.

• PI(s): Paula Olmos & Hubert Marraud
• Start & end date: 01/09/2023 – 31/08/2027
• Budget: 44 700 €
• Funding Agency: MCIN/ AEI / 10.13039/501100011033 and “ERDF A way of making Europe”
• Country: Spain

Name of the project: Multilingual and Multicultural Spaces for Political Deliberation (MULTIPOD: EU grant 101178821)

As highlighted by the Conference on the Future of Europe, EU citizens at large feel that the interplay between national media discourse and political/cultural contexts affects the perceptions and reactions to global events differently. Language barriers exacerbate siloed thinking, the bandwagon effect, group thinking, and the lack of diversity in dialogue around issues of international relevance, creating “areas” of thinking entrenched into national and language gates and hindering the creation of a truly European public sphere. Such challenges to democratic participation disproportionally affect members of cultural and linguistic minorities within and across EU member states. The research and innovation roadmap of the MultiPoD project aims to radically improve the political dialogue at the European level through evolving knowledge graphs and generative, Artificial Intelligence-driven technologies that mobilise collective intelligence, bridge existing communication barriers, and yield a better understanding of the interdependencies between participatory processes, policy decisions and behavioural, thought and argumentation patterns in the public deliberation of international affairs. For this purpose, MultiPoD brings together experienced use case partners, as well as European networks engaged in fostering participatory, deliberative democratic processes, technology partners with a strong track record in multilingual language processing, and leading research partners, specialised in collective intelligence, argumentation theory, human-computer interaction and visual methods for supporting and analysing online communication.

• PI(s): Arno Scharl (AT); Anna De Liddo (UK); Marcin Lewinski (PT)
  
• Start & end date: 2024-2027
  
• Budget: 2.998.251 €
• Funding Agency: European Commission: Horizon Europe
  
• Country: Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, Portugal, Spain, UK
  
• Website of the project: https://multipod-project.eu/

Name of the project: PERYCLES – Participatory dEmocRacY that sCaLES (EU grant agreement n. 101177658)

Civil society and public authorities are increasingly turning to digital democracy tools to improve citizens’ participation in democratic processes and the legitimacy of policy decisions. However, digital democracy technology today is not yet fit to meet the lofty goal of providing an all-round democratic infrastructure that can re-empower citizens and make public administrations more relevant and responsive to the citizenry’s wills and needs, because it is currently developed and deployed without evidence-based methods to design, assess and validate it.
PERYCLES tackles the challenge of developing such know-how, analyzing and testing platform designs on an open-source software for democratic deliberation that can be deployed at multiple levels of governance: from local, to national, to transnational. To do so, we develop a first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary approach to the design of digital democracy technology, which integrates methods and concepts from democratic theory, the social sciences and the computing sciences. The outcome of the project will be threefold: first, a set of methods to assess digital democracy solutions in a principled manner; second, readily available open-source implementations of digital democracy solutions that meet the identified standards; third, a library of best practices and recommendations for the design and deployment of online participation platforms.

• PI(s): Davide Grossi
• Start & end date: 01/01/2025 – 31/12/2027
• Budget: 3 271 305 €
• Funding Agency: European Commission
• Country: The Netherlands
• Website of the project: https://perycles-project.eu/

Name of the project: ORBIS – Augmenting participation, co-creation, trust and transparency in Deliberative Democracy at all scales (Horizon Europe Framework Programme, grant agreement No 101094765)

Citizens increasingly demand to be engaged in democratic and inclusive discussions about new ways to prevent, mitigate, and even resolve ongoing crises and conflicts. ORBIS responds to the profound lack of dialogue between citizenship and policy making institutions by providing (1) a theoretically sound and highly pragmatic socio-technical solution to enable the transition to a more inclusive, transparent and trustful Deliberative Democracy in Europe; (2) exploring models of digitally-enhanced democracy for scaling participation.

• PI(s): POLIMI, Milan, Italy 
• Start & end date: 2023 – 2026
• Budget: ~3 000 000€ 
• Funding Agency: European Union’s Horizon Europe Framework Programme; for Switzerland: SERI-Segreteria di Stato per l’Educazione e la Ricerca
• Country: Switzerland and France
• Website of the project: https://orbis-project.eu/

Name of the project: Costruire spazi di dialogo per la risoluzione dei conflitti (Building dialogue space to resolve conflicts) SNSF LAAGP0_223929 

To address the need to learn argumentation tools to build dialogue spaces to solve conflicts, the project “Costruire spazi di dialogo per la risoluzione dei conflitti” proposes an argumentative toolkit, based on dialogical tools derived from discourse and argumentation research on dispute mediation and the resolution of conflicts. The project introduces an innovative package of activities, whose core includes communication events in classrooms: a LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® (LSP) workshop explicitly designed for students to reflect on their conflicts and how to deal with them, and a dialogic classroom session following LSP in which the argumentative toolkit, based on research in linguistics and argumentation, is introduced, answering to needs and concerns emerged from the participants involved in LSP.

• PI(s): Sara Greco
• Start & end date: 2024 – 2026
• Budget: ~150 000€
• Funding Agency: Swiss National Science Foundation
• Country: Switzerland
• Website of the project: https://spazididialogo.ch/

PAST PROJECTS

Name of the project: Ecological reasoning and decision making in innovation-oriented industry sectors at the periphery of Europe: Reconciling divergent values and interests (TUBITAK/0010/2014)

Long-term policy problems such as climate change and sustainable development are characterised not only by their controversial social consequences and relation to “the common good”, but also and especially by the epistemic and practical uncertainties involved in their formulation. These uncertainties pave the way for institutional and cultural assumptions and values to play a significant role in decision-making processes. This project aims to account for the role values play in debates and decisions of major industry actors concerning transition to a low-carbon economy. By comparing and refining the contemporary instruments of analysis to examine the ethical issues underlying the technological management of the climate system, we pursue a systematic assessment of the cultural, political and practical aspects of the patterns of reasoning employed by the major actors of the mentioned transition. The practical implication consists of a series of viable proposals that could enhance communication and collaboration across disciplinary, cultural and sectoral boundaries.

• PI(s): Marcin Lewinski (PT); Önder Küçükural (TR)
  
• Start & end date: 2017–2019
  
• Budget: 100.860€
• Funding Agency: Portuguese (FCT) and Turkish (TÜBİTAK) science foundation
  
• Country: Portugal, Turkey
  

Name of the project: COST Action European network for argumentation and public policy analysis (APPLY: CA 17132)

The more than 300 researchers involved in the COST Action European network for Argumentation and Public PoLicY analysis (APPLY) have aimed at improving the way European citizens understand, evaluate, and contribute to public decision-making on such matters of common concern as climate change or a global pandemic.

Both individually and collectively, they have produced empirical results, advanced theories, and developed tools that can help people navigate communication in the information age, especially in the public domain.

COST Action APPLY has identified and treated gaps existing between the citizens’, policymakers’ and scholarly experts’ argumentation. The identification of gaps has been conducted in Working Groups 1 and 3, who have tried to understand the difficulties these parties have in arguing together, either by documenting their practices through the compilation of D-APPLY, its database of argumentative and deliberative discourse, and by conducting analyses of public argumentation or by engaging with stakeholders to better understand their difficulties when it comes to argue in the public sphere and in their deliberative activities. The descriptive goal of APPLY has thus been reached by providing a better understanding of public deliberation. The normative goal of APPLY was to reflect on the nature of public argumentation and on the constraints that are imposed onto it, which determine, to a large extent, whether the argumentation is acceptable or not. Through the philosophical work conducted in Working Group 2, APPLY has identified key normative aspects of public argumentation and has provided an exhaustive account of the criteria public arguments should fulfil to qualify as democratically sound, i.e., compatible with a truly deliberative and representative agenda. The final component of the Action, related to its prescriptive goals, is embodied in its practical outcomes. Our final guidelines for the design of public argumentation are a valuable resource that is now available for any
stakeholder wishing to craft public messages that are argumentatively sound, and which are likely to be effective when publicly released. Our further work on user-friendly applications for conducting large-scale deliberation, challenging fake news, visualising and analysing arguments, and argument mining is specifically tailored to provide solutions for public arguers who wish to engage in deliberatively sound decision-making practices.

• PI(s): Marcin Lewinski

• Budget: 772.707 €
• Funding Agency: COST (European CO-operation in Science and Technology), supported by the Horizon 2020 / Horizon Europe Programme
• Country: Portugal
• Website of the project: https://publicpolicyargument.eu/

Name of the project: The Social Epistemology of Argumentation 771074-SEA

Argumentation -the practice of giving and asking for reasons to support claims – is a key component of scientific inquiry, legal procedures, and political life. But in many instances, argumentation does not achieve its presumed goal of fostering consensus and circulation of reliable information. Recent events in world politics – Brexit, US elections, refugee crisis – demonstrate that a better grasp of what argumentation can and cannot do for us is urgently needed.
The key question of this project is: ‘what does it take for a process of argumentation to improve our epistemic situation?’ Prior theories fail because they are based on overly idealized assumptions. This project develops a more realistic approach: argumentation is viewed as a practice interwoven with power relations, occurring in situations of epistemic and social diversity, and involving agents who are not ‘purely rational’. We will formulate the first comprehensive account of the social epistemology of argumentation, i.e. of the role of argumentation in processes of circulation and production of knowledge, evidence, and justification. To this end, we will bring together two research traditions that so far remain largely disconnected: social epistemology and argumentation theory.
Our innovative hypothesis is that argumentation is a form of social exchange that can be successful to various degrees. What is exchanged are epistemic resources such as knowledge, evidence, justification, critical objections. Insights from social exchange theory will inform the investigation, a suitable framework for our purposes because it emphasizes the interplay between self-interest and interdependence. The result will be a realistic theory of the processes through which epistemic resources are shared and produced through argumentation. It will offer concrete prescriptions on how to optimize these processes, with wide-ranging applications wherever argumentation is crucial: scientific, legal, and political/public discourse.

• PI(s): Catarina Dutilh Novaes
• Start & end date: 01/07/2018 – 30/06/2024
• Budget: 1 700 000€
• Funding Agency: European Research Council
• Country: The Netherlands

Name of the project: Argumentation-driven explainable artificial intelligence for digital medicine (ANTIDOTE: CHIST-ERA/002/2019)

Providing high quality explanations for AI predictions based on machine learning requires combining several interrelated aspects, including, among the others: selecting a proper level of generality/specificity of the explanation, considering assumptions about the familiarity of the explanation beneficiary with the AI task under consideration, referring to specific elements that have contributed to the decision, making use of additional knowledge (e.g. metadata) which might not be part of the prediction process, selecting appropriate examples, providing evidences supporting negative hypothesis, and the capacity to formulate the explanation in a clearly interpretable, and possibly convincing, way.

According to the above considerations, ANTIDOTE fostered an integrated vision of explainable AI, where low level characteristics of the deep learning process are combined with higher level schemas proper of the human argumentation capacity. The ANTIDOTE integrated vision is supported by three considerations: There is a consensus that neural architectures exhibit a weak correlation between internal states of the network (e.g. weights assumed by single nodes) and the network classification outcome; High quality explanations are crucially based on argumentation mechanisms (e.g. provide supporting examples and rejected alternatives), that are, to a large extent, task independent; In real settings, providing explanations is inherently an interactive process, where an explanatory dialogue takes place between the system and the user.

Accordingly, ANTIDOTE exploited cross-disciplinary competences in three areas, i.e. deep learning, argumentation and interactivity, to support a broader and innovative view of explainable AI. Although we envisioned a general integrated approach to explainable AI, we focused on a number of deep learning tasks in the medical domain, where the need for high quality explanations, both to clinicians and to patients, is perhaps more critical than in other domains.

• PI(s): Elena Cabrio & Serena Villata
  
• Start & end date: 2021-2024
  
• Budget: 957.478€
• Funding Agency: CHIST-ERA programme, supported by the Horizon 2020 Programme (ERA-NET Cofund)
  
• Country: France, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Spain
  
• Website of the project: https://univ-cotedazur.eu/antidote

Name of the project: AMoRe (Argumentative Model of Rephrase) (SNF project n°100019E_202273)

This project aims to understand the multidimensional dynamics of rephrase as an argumentative device meant to influence an audience and to fulfil a variety of communicative tasks. This research goal is driven by the overarching question: How do speakers do things with rephrases?, or more specifically: How do speakers argue with rephrases? We address this problem by uncovering and exploring the dynamic patterns of rephrase on three dimensions associated with three disciplines. Contemporary philosophy of argumentation will help us identify schemes of rephrase that are analogous to argumentation schemes, along with reframing structures which are analogous to the straw man strategy. Drawing on extant accounts of reformulation and paraphrase, the pragmatic dimension of the project will establish the specificity and capture the richness of rephrase uses, encompassing locutionary manoeuvres to incorporate rephrase in dialogue, illocutionary intentions associated to rephrase, and their perlocutionary effects such as successful persuasion. Finally, insights from rhetoric provide us with a theoretical framework for capturing patterns of rephrase-sensitive rhetorical figures (such as antimetabole or anaphora) and rhetorical relations (such as elaboration or summarisation). In so doing, we will simultaneously inquire into how rephrase is linked to the three modes of persuasion: logos, ethos, and pathos.

• PI(s): Steve Oswald & Marcin Koszowy
• Start & end date: 01/01/2022–31/12/2025
• Budget: 730 000 €
• Funding Agency: Swiss National Fund
• Country: Switzerland
• Website of the project: https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/202273

Name of the project: Toolkit for educating to a dynamic citizenship (TEDYC), 2022-1-CH01-IP-0028

The objective of TEDYC is to develop a didactic toolkit for the development of personal and social argumentative competences, in particular linked to the concept of dialogic argumentation – which prompts the capacity to decenter oneself and actively listen to different points of view. The aim is to create a product that can be used both online and in presence, and that can be adapted to different didactic contexts for young people in the age range 12 – 18 years.

• PI(s): Marco Lupatini
• Start & end date: 2022 – 2025
• Budget: ~150 000€
• Funding Agency: Movetia International Program
• Country: Switzerland
• Website of the project: https://www.dynamic-citizenship.ch/