Anticipatory Thinking with Argument Schemes Nancy L. Green Department of Computer Science University of North Carolina at Greensboro Greensboro, NC 27402 USA nlgreen@uncg.edu Abstract schemes. Anticipatory thinking (AT) is defined in the call In previous work we proposed a set of argument schemes for papers as “the deliberate and divergent exploration of for arguing about the putative intentions of foreign actors relevant possible futures.” We contend that the process of and for responses to their actions, and created an argument AT should include making arguments for the hypothesized diagramming tool providing those schemes as cognitive futures and challenging those arguments. In this paper, we building blocks. In this paper we define an intentional define an intentional argument scheme for AT and argument scheme for anticipatory thinking and propose propose that an argument diagramming tool can be used to that an argument diagramming tool can further support anticipatory thinking. support individual or collaborative construction, evaluation, and communication of arguments in AT. Introduction AVIZE’s Argument Schemes Critical thinking about international politics often involves reasoning about the beliefs, goals, appraisals, actions, and AVIZE provides a set of argument schemes tailored to plans of actors such as foreign governments. In previous international affairs for constructing arguments in this work (Green et al. 2019), we analyzed arguments in domain. For example, the Plan Distraction scheme is expert-written reports on international affairs in terms of defined as follows. (Capitalized terms such as Actor and argument schemes. Argument schemes were originally Protagonist are place holders for countries used so that the proposed by argumentation theorists to describe schemes can be applied to many different situations, not acceptable, but not necessarily deductively valid, and just the cases we analyzed when defining the schemes.) possibly defeasible, generic patterns of reasoning used in law, science and everyday conversation (Walton et al. Plan Distraction Scheme 2008). Examples of such patterns include Argument from Premises: Expert Opinion and Reasoning to the Best Explanation. 1. Actor does Acts to divert Protagonist’s attention Based primarily upon an article on the Russian from Other Acts. government’s strategy for increasing Russia’s global 2. Actor believes that Protagonist would oppose influence (Weinberger 2016), we defined a set of schemes Other Acts, otherwise. tailored for arguing about the putative intentions of Conclusion: Actor does not want Protagonist to oppose foreign actors and for responses to their actions. Our goal Other Acts. was to provide this set of argument schemes to students and analysts of international affairs. Although the schemes An example of this type of argument appeared in could be used to analyze the argumentation in existing (Weinberger 2016): Putin has kept international attention reports on international affairs, our intent was for them to riveted on Russian operations in Syria while escalating be used as cognitive building blocks for constructing new military deployments and political operations across arguments from collected evidence. To further support Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. (The conclusion, that argument construction, we developed an argument Putin/Russia does not want the U.S. to oppose the military diagramming tool, AVIZE (Argument Visualization and deployments and political operations, is implicit.) Self-Evaluation), that provides this set of argument Argumentation theorists have proposed posing critical questions associated with each argument scheme as a means of challenging an argument. In AVIZE, all of the Copyright © 2020 by its author. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). schemes include two critical questions: How reliable is the source of each premise? How likely is each premise? In addition, the Plan Distraction scheme described above includes the questions: In the Actor’s view, are the The first prediction, that the two sides will clash, is consequences of Acts/Other Acts acceptable? based on the argument that Russia (R) has a distal goal of We manually analyzed the 33-paragraph article on the election of a pro-R government in the Ukraine, which Russia’s global strategy as containing the following is consistent with the value of R having increased global sequence of instances of our schemes: Plan Distraction, influence; R has a proximal goal of fomenting clashes Coercion, critical question of Coercion, Resist Coercion, between the two sides (consistent with that distal goal); R Plan Deception, Inferred Plan, Coercion, Increasing inserted provocateurs into the march in order to bring Boldness, Coercion, Inferred Plan, Inferred Plan, Resist about clashes between the two sides when they meet in the Coercion, Practical Reasoning, Avoid Negative capital; therefore clashes will occur between the Orthodox Consequences, Avoid Negative Consequences, and and Nationalists in the capital (due to R’s intervention). Practical Reasoning. Schemes that we identified in other The next prediction, that the current anti-R government articles include Inferred Positive/Negative Appraisal and will lose popular support, is based on the argument that R Behavior Pattern. (While most of the scheme names are has the distal goal described above; R has a proximal goal suggestive of their purpose, it should be noted that the of loss of popular support for the anti-R government name ‘Practical Reasoning’ is used in argumentation (consistent with that distal goal); clashes will occur theory to refer to an argument for a plan of action.) Since between the Orthodox and Nationalists in the capital (due the schemes were derived from analysis of expert-written to R’s intervention); therefore the current anti-R reports, they should be helpful to students and analysts in government will lose popular support (due to R’s creating arguments of their own or for analyzing the intervention). The final prediction, that a pro-R arguments of others. government will be elected, is based on the argument that R has the distal goal described above; R has a proximal goal of the election of a pro-R government (identical to New Argument Scheme for AT that distal goal); that the anti-R government will lose Although the scheme set developed for AVIZE was not popular support (due to R’s intervention); a group of pro- based on analysis of examples of anticipatory thinking, R candidates are available to run for office; therefore a two of the schemes – Increasing Boldness and Behavior pro-R government will be elected (due to R’s Pattern – could be used for AT. Here we propose that by intervention). manually analyzing examples, additional schemes useful This chain of arguments is summarized in Figure 1. By for AT could be identified. For example, now we will convention, premises are connected by an upward consider a report written several years ago warning of a pointing arrow to a conclusion. The name of the scheme Russian attempt to influence the election of a pro-Russian (IC2E) appears to the right of the arrow. Entailments of government in the Ukraine. The report noted that a large conclusions are connected by horizontal arrows labeled march of Orthodox supporters was headed to the capital, ‘Entails’. For example, the claim that Russian intervention where they would be met by Nationalist supporters. It will cause the two groups to clash entails the claim that stated that there was evidence that the march had been the two groups will clash. infiltrated by provocateurs and predicted that clashes Any of the arguments in the chain could be challenged between the two groups would ensue, leading to a loss of by providing counterarguments or posing critical popular support for the current anti-Russian government, questions. We propose at least the following critical resulting in the election of a pro-Russian government. questions for IC2E. Note that the last three questions refer This anticipation of possible future events could be to the arguer’s beliefs about the Actor’s beliefs. modeled with a chain of arguments, each of which can be analyzed in terms of the Intentional Cause to Effect IC2E Critical Questions (IC2E) scheme, which we define as follows. 1. How reliable is the source of each premise? 2. How likely is each premise? 3. How likely is the Proximal Goal to be achieved by Intentional Cause to Effect (IC2E) Actor’s Intervention in the given Circumstances? Premises: Are there factors unknown or ignored by Actor 1. Actor has Distal Goal consistent with Value. that may impede its success? 2. Actor has Proximal Goal, consistent with that 4. In Actor’s view is Proximal Goal likely to be Distal Goal. achieved by Intervention in the Circumstances? 3. Actor does (will do) Intervention to bring about 5. In Actor’s view is Intervention feasible in the Proximal Goal. Circumstances? 4. Intervention is (will be) feasible in the then present 6. In Actor’s view are the consequences of Circumstances. Intervention acceptable, or would they inhibit Conclusion: Actor causes (will cause) Proximal Goal to be Actor from performing Intervention? achieved. Figure 1 shows a challenge to the argument at the bottom of the tree using the first critical question, i.e., how reliable is the evidence that R has inserted provocateurs? Conclusion Also, the third critical question is shown as challenging The Intentional Cause to Effect scheme defined above the final (top-most) argument. Furthermore, by adding could be added to the scheme set of AVIZE to support IC2E to a repertoire of argument schemes, one may build AT. By analyzing further examples of AT, other relevant complex arguments involving more than just causal schemes could be identified. A graphical tool such as reasoning about an actor’s intentions. For example, as AVIZE could be used by students and analysts to make shown in Figure 1, the premise that R has a distal goal of AT assumptions, claims, and challenges visible. In the the election of a pro-R government could be justified itself long term, using argument schemes for AT such as IC2E by a Behavior Pattern argument, i.e., based upon R’s past to generate arguments automatically, it may even be behavior in other countries. Because of the potential possible to use them to hypothesize future events. complexity of the arguments for and against alternative scenarios, we propose that an argument diagramming tool, such as one described in the next section, be used to References visually support individual or collaborative construction, evaluation, and communication of arguments in AT. Green, N.L, Branon, M., and Roosje, L. 2019. Argument Schemes and Visualization Software for Critical Thinking about International Politics. Argument and Computation Argument Diagramming in AVIZE 10(1), 41-53. AVIZE 1 was designed to support critical thinking by a Loll, F. and Pinkwart, N. 2013. LASAD: Flexible process in which users must evaluate possibly conflicting Representations for Computer-Based Collaborative evidence from a variety of sources such as different print Argumentation. International Journal of Human- or broadcast news organizations; construct a graphical Computer Interaction 71(1), 91-109. representation of arguments for a hypothesis using that evidence and argument schemes; challenge the arguments; Pioch, N.J. and Everett, J.O. 2006. POLESTAR – and defend the argument against the challenges. As shown Collaborative Knowledge Management and Sensemaking in Figure 2, potential evidence (with accompanying Tools for Intelligence Analysts. CIKM 2006, 513-521. metadata such as source) is presented in a panel on the left side of the screen. Argument scheme definitions and Schrag, R., Wright, E., Kerr, R. Johnson, et al. 2016. critical questions are presented in a panel on the right Probabilistic Argument Maps for Intelligence Analysis. hand side of the screen. The center of the screen is a drag- CMNA 2016. and-drop style argument diagram construction workspace. Figure 3 shows an example of an argument so constructed. Shum, S.B., Selvin, A.M., Shierhuis, M., Conklin, J., et al. 2006. Hypermedia support for argumentation-based Related Work rationale 4: 111-132. A variety of argument diagramming tools have been Tecuci, Schum, Marcu, and Boicu. 2016. Intelligence developed to support critical thinking (Van Gelder, 2007; Analysis as Discovery of Evidence, Hypotheses, and Shum et al. 2006; Loll and Pinkwart 2013). Some Arguments. Cambridge University Press. comprehensive intelligence analysis systems also provide tools for argument diagramming (Toniolo et al. 2015; Toniolo, A., Norman, T.J., Etuk, A., Cerutti, F., et al. Pioch and Everett 2006; Schrag et al. 2016; Tecuci et al. 2015. Supporting Reasoning with Different Types of 2016). However none of these tools provide argument Evidence in Intelligence Analysis. AAMAS 2015, 781-9. schemes tailored to plan recognition in international affairs (as in AVIZE) or anticipatory thinking involving Van Gelder, T. 2007. The rationale for Rationale. Law, intentions in that domain, e.g., the IC2E scheme. Probability and Risk 6(1-4), 23-42. 1 A prototype implementation of AVIZE is available at Walton, D., Reed, C., and Macagno, F. 2008. https://github.com/greennl/AVIZE. Work is underway to Argumentation Schemes. Cambridge University Press. improve the tool for use in an undergraduate AI Ethics Weinberger, K. 2016. Putin sets the stage for the course using a set of argument schemes tailored to AI incoming U.S. administration. Institute for the Study of Ethics. War. (Downloaded from www.understandingwar.org.) Figure 1. Summary of chain of IC2E arguments in Ukraine example. (‘PxGoal’ stands for ‘proximal goal’. Challenges are shown connected by links with a crossed circle.) R will cause pro-R gov to Entails pro-R gov will be be elected elected CQ: PxGoal3 not likely to succeed … IC2E R has [PxGoal3: pro-R R will cause anti-R gov Entails Feasible Anti-R gov will lose gov to be elected] to lose popular support popular support IC2E Entails R has [PxGoal2: anti-R R will cause clashes Clashes between O & N Feasible gov to lose support] between O and N will occur IC2E R has [PxGoal1: clashes R inserted provocateurs to CQ: not reliable Feasible between O & N] bring about clashes … R has [Distal Goal: pro-R gov to be Behavior Pattern R had similar goal in other elected] consistent with [Value: countries … increased R global influence] Figure 2. Screen shot of AVIZE. Evidence panel is on left. For illustration, all the evidence snippets were extracted from (Weinberger 2016). It is assumed that in actual use, text in the evidence panel will have been selected manually or automatically from multiple, possibly conflicting sources. Argument scheme definitions are on right. Clicking on scheme name causes scheme template to appear in diagramming workspace to be filled in by user. Figure 3. Screen shot of AVIZE with argument diagram in center and side panels minimized. Argument that U.S. should resist R coercion to not oppose R’s global expansion has been constructed using two argument schemes from the right hand panel. Relevant evidence has been dragged from the evidence panel and attached to the premises.