An argument may be considered sound (“admissible” or “RSA-compliable” in informal logic) if it is well-formed and fulfills a number of reasonable semantic criteria. When agents exchange arguments, not all incoming arguments are sound.

This paper formulates two results. First, it gives lower bounds for the verification rate of incoming arguments, given an estimate of the percentage of incoming sound arguments and a predefined tolerance of error. Second, it prescribes what percentage of incoming arguments must be verified if there is no prescribed error tolerance, but there is a tradeoff between cost of verification and cost of error.