Gustavo Lacerda

One of my projects is about annotating the argumentative structure of texts.

My advisor is interested in sources like newspaper editorials, political blogs, etc. He likes to annotate expressions of agreement/disagreement, sentiment, etc. He's not interested in formalizing "normative arguments", such as those found in math/science textbooks or philosophy texts, let alone something formalistic like Landau's Grundlagen (Automath version + full text in LaTeX, simple type theory version 1 2), because we have no reason to think that learning on such a corpus will transfer to real-world texts.

As a consequence, he is interested in doing coarser formalizations. It's perfectly possible to annotate logical steps (whether as valid steps: "modus ponens", "syllogism #5", etc, or as fallacies like "affirming the antecedent", "straw man", etc.), but in practice this will need to be a bit subjective, because:
* arguments in real texts (and the sentences inside them) may be ambiguous.
* arguments in real texts almost always make use of tacit knowledge (including "common sense" knowledge).

I am uncomfortable with this subjectivity. I am more interested in normative arguments, like those found in textbooks and philosophy texts. My natural tendency is always towards fine formalizations: I want dig out the exact logical structure of the argument. (I recognize that fine formalizations are subjective too: even the proofs inside Grundlagen might potentially be interpreted in non-equivalent ways, but somehow that doesn't bother me as much. I wonder why.)

However, my advisor and I do have some intersection in interests:
* annotating argumentative/explanatory triangles (2 explicit premises, 1 conclusion) and lines (1 explicit premise, 1 hidden premise, 1 conclusion).
* annotating discourse relations ("elaboration", "explanation", "illustration", etc.)

The current plan is to annotate the blog posts that I mirrored last week (for a different purpose). I'm expecting to get very simple, disconnected lines and maybe a few triangles. I'd be (pleasantly) surprised if there are any trees deeper than that. This is not my ideal corpus, but it's a start.

My ideal corpus would be a collection of philosophical texts (although a book like Armchair Economics seems like a very rich source). Does anybody know of a source of philosophical texts in digital form?