I think I’ve come across this once before. It wouldn’t have sprung to mind as connected to argument mapping, so thanks for the connection.
I’m afraid, though, that from the outside it doesn’t look like it contributes much to what I’m after, which is exposing the structure of the cryonics debate or decision. Or is there some place where the source code to the inferential chains is published?
The intent is to have a shared model, that allows a conversation to turn away from “doesn’t—does so”, and toward “this spot is where we disagree”.
which are not the inferential chains, just the basic building blocks. The inferential chains themselves are generated on the fly.
No, it doesn’t by itself lead to a good visualization of the argument structures, though it should be pretty easy to write some code to run these through graphviz’s dot (or any other) graph visualizer. You do have to figure out how to represent harder implications, such as “(DETERMIN & FREEWILL ⇒ !NOFTL)”, but a box per conjunction/disjunction isn’t too hard.
The intent is to have a shared model, that allows a conversation to turn away from “doesn’t—does so”, and toward “this spot is where we disagree”.
Yes, this doesn’t quite do that yet, but it seems to be a reasonable starting point.
I suspect that for non-trivial discussions, turning your arguments into one of these formal models would take more skull sweat than the usual ad hoc methods of identifying where exactly two people disagree. And the people who really need help with this are the people who would take one look at the premise of the worldview manager and laugh contemptuously, then not think about it any more.
I also suspect that the process of actually making one of these formal models would be a good exercise in breaking down your ideas, and could give interesting inights. The model of libertarian ideas is a good example of this.
I think I’ve come across this once before. It wouldn’t have sprung to mind as connected to argument mapping, so thanks for the connection.
I’m afraid, though, that from the outside it doesn’t look like it contributes much to what I’m after, which is exposing the structure of the cryonics debate or decision. Or is there some place where the source code to the inferential chains is published?
The intent is to have a shared model, that allows a conversation to turn away from “doesn’t—does so”, and toward “this spot is where we disagree”.
The entire source code and history is published at http://www.gitorious.org/worldview and this includes the sample worldviews:
http://www.gitorious.org/worldview/worldview/blobs/master/topics/axiom_of_choice.wvm
includes lines such as:
(CHOICE ⇔ TRICHOTOMY)
(CHOICE ⇒ !MEASURE)
(CHOICE ⇒ UNION)
which are not the inferential chains, just the basic building blocks. The inferential chains themselves are generated on the fly. No, it doesn’t by itself lead to a good visualization of the argument structures, though it should be pretty easy to write some code to run these through graphviz’s dot (or any other) graph visualizer. You do have to figure out how to represent harder implications, such as “(DETERMIN & FREEWILL ⇒ !NOFTL)”, but a box per conjunction/disjunction isn’t too hard.
Yes, this doesn’t quite do that yet, but it seems to be a reasonable starting point.
I wasn’t sure I liked this idea, but I’m definitely in favor of it now.
I suspect that for non-trivial discussions, turning your arguments into one of these formal models would take more skull sweat than the usual ad hoc methods of identifying where exactly two people disagree. And the people who really need help with this are the people who would take one look at the premise of the worldview manager and laugh contemptuously, then not think about it any more.
I also suspect that the process of actually making one of these formal models would be a good exercise in breaking down your ideas, and could give interesting inights. The model of libertarian ideas is a good example of this.