Explainable Reasoning in Face of Contradictions: From Humans to Machines

A well-studied trait of human reasoning and decision-making is the ability to not only make decisions in the presence of contradictions, but also to explain why a decision was made, in particular if a decision deviates from what is expected by an inquirer who requests the explanation. In this paper, we examine this phenomenon, which has been extensively explored by behavioral economics research, from the perspective of symbolic artificial intelligence. In particular, we introduce four levels of intelligent reasoning in face of contradictions, which we motivate from a microeconomics and behavioral economics perspective. We relate these principles to symbolic reasoning approaches, using abstract argumentation as an exemplary method. This allows us to ground the four levels in a body of related previous and ongoing research, which we use as a point of departure for outlining future research directions.