Make reasoning visible.
Understand why.
WhyGraph is a collaborative workspace for building and examining arguments. Map claims, evidence, and foundational propositions, make inferential relationships explicit, and revise your reasoning as the deliberation develops.
Demo Mode needs no account and stores nothing; you can download your deliberation to keep it. To save deliberations and work on them together, sign in.
Claim
A proposition put forward in the deliberation that needs support. Claims support other claims, up to the Central Claim, forming chains of reasoning.
External Source
Evidence from outside the deliberation, such as a study, a dataset or a document, that supports a claim. Linked, so that others can check it.
Axiom
A foundational proposition the argument rests on and that is not argued for any further. Axioms make starting points explicit and show where views diverge.
How it works
State the Central Claim
Start a deliberation with the claim you want to examine.
Build the argument graph
In Build Mode, support the Central Claim with claims, external sources, and axioms, and connect each of them to what it supports.
Examine it together
Invite others to review every node: they can accept, dispute, or reject it, and the reasons they give stay attached to the node.
Revise and document
Revise the argument graph as the deliberation develops. It keeps a record of which reasons support which conclusions, so the justification can be looked at again later.
Reasoning you can inspect
WhyGraph helps people structure and examine their own reasoning. It does not reason or decide for you.
Structured collaborative reasoning
Instead of long threads, a deliberation becomes an argument graph: every claim is a node, every inference an arrow. Several people can build and examine the same argument graph.
People stay in control
You decide what is claimed, how claims are connected, and how they are assessed. Tools such as the validity check only point things out; the argument graph changes only when you change it.
Transparent documentation
An argument graph documents why a decision was taken: which claims, sources and axioms it rests on, and which of them were disputed. This makes it possible to review the justification later, for example in AI governance, where decisions have to be accountable.
Logical validity checking
For deductive inferences, WhyGraph can check whether a claim follows logically from the nodes supporting it, and mark the valid inferences. It checks the form of an inference, not whether its premises are true.
Read the Logic guide →About this project
WhyGraph is an early research demo and work in progress, made by Jonathan Gärtner, Svenja Omlor, and Sarah Sterz. If you have questions, suggestions, or other inquiries, please contact Sarah Sterz at sterz@depend.uni-saarland.de.