Science is, in theory, “nice and principled”. We have the scientific method to guide experimentation, we have null hypothesis testing, so one could say nothing can really go wrong. What we get is what is “out there”. That is in theory, of course…

Coming back to good-old reality, things are not exactly perfect. First of all, we have the omnipresent sampling effect – our certainty over particular experimental results is always limited by measurement errors. Secondly, the way data is aggregated and conclusions drawn, may be biased: assumptions taken for granted, methods that are not really applicable to the given context, etc. Transparency is an issue. Finally, one of the biggest fish in the pond is the issue of scaling: drawing conclusions for large-scale systems, from small-scale observations.

From all this cloud of dust, argumentation techniques come to the rescue. They have been around for some time, especially in the domain [...]