A generalization of Dung's Abstract Framework for Argumentation: Arguing with Sets of Attacking Arguments

One of the most widely studied systems of argumentation is the one described by Dung in a paper from 1995. Unfortunately, this framework does not allow for joint attacks on arguments, which we argue must be required of any truly abstract argumentation framework. A few frameworks can be said to allow for such interactions among arguments, but for various reasons we believe that these are inadequate for modelling argumentation systems with joint attacks. In this paper we propose a generalization of the framework of Dung, which allows for sets of arguments to attack other arguments. We extend the semantics associated with the original framework to this generalization, and prove that all results in the paper by Dung have an equivalent in this more abstract framework.