Practical reasoning using values giving meaning to values

Each person holds numerous values that represent what is believed to be important. As a result, our values influence our behavior and influence practical reasoning. Various argumentation approaches use values to justify actions, but assume knowledge about whether state transitions promote or demote values. However, this knowledge is typically disputable, since people give different meanings to the same value. This paper proposes an argumentation mechanism to argue about the meaning of an value and thus about whether state transitions promote or demote values. After giving an overview of how values are defined in social psychology, this paper defines values as preference orders and introduces several argument schemes to reason about preferences. These schemes are used to give meaning to values and to determine whether values are promoted or demoted. Furthermore, value systems are used for practical reasoning and allow resolving conflicts when pursuing your values. An example is given of how the new argument schemes can be used to do practical reasoning using values. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.