Constitutive rules for agent communication languages

We follow Searle's contention that speaking a (natural) language is to engage in a rulegoverned form of behaviour, and that those rules are conventional (institutional) rather than natural or physical. We show how this analysis can also be used to specify rules of interaction for systems of electronic agents communicating with an artificial language. We conclude that using constitutive rules to define the semantics of an agent communication language not only distinguishes agent communication from method invocation, but also offers significant computational advantages over using intentional states.