Summary: Argumentation theory studies the fundamental mechanism humans use in argumentation and explores ways to implement this mechanism on computers. Dung’s approach, presented in [9], is a unifying framework which has played an influential role on argumentation research. In this paper, we show that, a logic programming semantics, called MM$^r$, can be used to characterize the preferred argumentation semantics defined by Dung in [9]. The MM$^r$ [12] is based on the the minimal model semantics. The characterization of this argumentation semantics by the MM$^r$ semantics suggests a new perception of this argumentation semantics in terms of logic foundations.