> Argumentation > Moves and Tactics > arghXiv:2508.02914
Substitution of the Contested Proposition Over the Course of an Exchange
Abstract: We recorded the proposition under dispute at message 1 and again at message 200 in 300 exchanges, and had two raters blind to the ordering code each pair for shared content (κ = 0.81). In 41 per cent of exchanges the two propositions had no content in common. The substitution rate was unrelated to exchange length, to participant count, and to whether the opening proposition had been resolved before message 200. We take the exchange, rather than the proposition, to be the conserved quantity.