What is an Inquiry Dialogue?

Paragraph taken from the introduction of 'A Generative Inquiry Dialogue System' by Elizabeth Black and Anthony Hunter (2007)

In this paper we focus on inquiry dialogues. Walton and Krabbe define an inquiry dialogue as arising from an initial situation of "general ignorance" and as having the main goal to achieve the "growth of knowledge and agreement". Each indiviual participating in an inquiry dialogue has the goal to "find a 'proof' or destroy one" ('Commitment in Dialogue: Basic Concepts of Interpersonal Reasoning', page 66)... we have defined two different types of inquiry dialogue, each of which we believe fits the general definition:

- warrant inquiry dialogue - the 'proof' takes the form of a dialectical tree (essentially a tree with an argument at each node, whose arcs represent the counter-argument relation and that has at its root an argument whose claim is the topic of the dialogue).

- argument inquiry dialogue - the 'proof' takes the form of an argument for the topic of the dialogue.

Argument inquiry dialogues are commonly embedded in warrant inquiry dialogues. In this paper, we will focus only on argument inquiry dialogues.