Argument Schemes for Reasoning about Trust

Simon Parsons, Katie Atkinson, Karen Zita Haigh, Karl N. Levitt, Peter McBurney, Jeff Rowe, Munindar P. Singh, Elizabeth Sklar

Abstract: Trust is a natural mechanism by which an autonomous party can deal with the inherent uncertainty regarding the behaviors of other parties and the uncertainty in the information it shares with those parties. Trust is thus crucial in any decentralized system. We build on recent efforts to use argumentation to reason about trust. Specifically, we provide a set of schemes, abstract patterns of reasoning that apply in multiple situations, geared toward trust. We describe, in the form of a set of critical questions, the situations in which the schemes may default.