I've been trying to develop a kind of argument map for mathematical proofs. Most proofs I come across are fairly ill-structured, especially from the point of view of someone with programming experience (a proof is just a program which operates on truths!). I'm still not sure about the grammar of these arguments, but some experiments are
The idea is that arguments supporting claims are indented, so you can read off the structure of the proof easier. Also, to keep nesting down, there is the convention that variables can be introduced with an implicit "for all" surrounding all of the following steps in a branch (using "suppose" or "for all"). Finally, proofs by contradiction are just case enumeration where some cases reach an impossibility.
I could see something like this being used for non-mathematical arguments. It would need a better way of having multiple arguments for claims, something math doesn't need. At some point I was thinking about a forum for arguments for facts/claims, where arguments can depend on these facts/claims. The idea would be that positions can be pulled up as a graph to see how strong or weak they are, or see where further arguing is needed. Perhaps something like this could improve political discourse.
- http://tmp.esoteri.casa/inv_dom.xml.html about dimension invariance of homeomorphisms, created to detangle an argument in Hatcher's Algebraic Topology book.
- http://tmp.esoteri.casa/galois.xml.html which only has some facts about polynomials so far, but again detangling some convoluted arguments.
The idea is that arguments supporting claims are indented, so you can read off the structure of the proof easier. Also, to keep nesting down, there is the convention that variables can be introduced with an implicit "for all" surrounding all of the following steps in a branch (using "suppose" or "for all"). Finally, proofs by contradiction are just case enumeration where some cases reach an impossibility.
I could see something like this being used for non-mathematical arguments. It would need a better way of having multiple arguments for claims, something math doesn't need. At some point I was thinking about a forum for arguments for facts/claims, where arguments can depend on these facts/claims. The idea would be that positions can be pulled up as a graph to see how strong or weak they are, or see where further arguing is needed. Perhaps something like this could improve political discourse.