Corporate agents

The logic of belief and intention in situations with multiple agents is increasingly well understood, but current formal approaches appear to face problems in applications where the number of agents greatly exceeds two. We provide an informal development of Corporate Agents, an intensional approximation of individual and group states which treats groups symmetrically with autonomous agents. Corporate Charters, constraints derived from typical patterns of information flow, replace detailed reasoning about the propagation of attitudes in most contexts. The approximation to an ideal logical formulation is not tight, but the model appears to function well in information-poor environments and fails in ways related to characteristic human errors. It may therefore be particularly appropriate to application in the area of natural language discourse

An Account of Opinion Implicatures

While previous sentiment analysis research has concentrated on the interpretation of explicitly stated opinions and attitudes, this work initiates the computational study of a type of opinion implicature (i.e., opinion-oriented inference) in text. This paper described a rule-based framework for representing and analyzing opinion implicatures which we hope will contribute to deeper automatic interpretation of subjective language. In the course of understanding implicatures, the system recognizes implicit sentiments (and beliefs) toward various events and entities in the sentence, often attributed to different sources (holders) and of mixed polarities; thus, it produces a richer interpretation than is typical in opinion analysis.Comment: 50 Pages. Submitted to the journal, Language Resources and Evaluatio

Multi-agent planning and scheduling, execution monitoring and incremental rescheduling: Application to motorway traffic

This article describes a planning method applicable to agents with great perception and decision-making capabilities and the ability to communicate with other agents. Each agent has a task to fulfill allowing for the actions of other agents in its vicinity. Certain simultaneous actions may cause conflicts because they require the same resource. The agent plans each of its actions and simultaneously transmits these to its neighbors. In a similar way, it receives plans from the other agents and must take account of these plans. The planning method allows us to build a distributed scheduling system. Here, these agents are robot vehicles on a highway communicating by radio. In this environment, conflicts between agents concern the allocation of space in time and are connected with the inertia of the vehicles. Each vehicle made a temporal, spatial, and situated reasoning in order to drive without collision. The flexibility and reactivity of the method presented here allows the agent to generate its plan based on assumptions concerning the other agents and then check these assumptions progressively as plans are received from the other agents. A multi-agent execution monitoring of these plans can be done, using data generated during planning and the multi-agent decision-making algorithm described here. A selective backtrack allows us to perform incremental rescheduling

Facing Openness with Socio Cognitive Trust and Categories.

Typical solutions for agents assessing trust relies on the circulation of information on the individual level, i.e. reputational images, subjective experiences, statistical analysis, etc. This work presents an alternative approach, inspired to the cognitive heuristics enabling humans to reason at a categorial level. The approach is envisaged as a crucial ability for agents in order to: (1) estimate trustworthiness of unknown trustees based on an ascribed membership to categories; (2) learn a series of emergent relations between trustees observable properties and their effective abilities to fulfill tasks in situated conditions. On such a basis, categorization is provided to recognize signs (Manifesta) through which hidden capabilities (Kripta) can be inferred. Learning is provided to refine reasoning attitudes needed to ascribe tasks to categories. A series of architectures combining categorization abilities, individual experiences and context awareness are evaluated and compared in simulated experiments

Freud, Modularity, and the Principle of Charity

Within the philosophy of mind, a `hermeneutical' tradition sees psychology as discontinuous with natural-scientific domains. A characteristic ingredient of this tendency is `normativism', which makes obedience to rational norms an a priori condition on agency. In this thesis, I advance an argument against normativism which trades on the notion of a psychological module. Specifically, I show how modules can be envisioned which, because of their high degree of irrationality, challenge the normativist's principle of charity. As an illustration, I describe such a module that incorporates key features of the Freudian `id', and I suggest that Freudian theory generally puts pressure on charity constraints. In sum, I seek to substantially undermine the hermeneutical view of the mind by attacking one of its central pillars. In Chapter 1, after setting out the essential features of hermeneuticism, I sketch the historical background of recent normativism by considering Quine's employment of charity in his theory of meaning and mind. Most centrally, I reject pragmatic and heuristic readings of Quinean charity in favor of one that sees it as a constitutive constraint on attribution. In Chapter 2, I begin to clarify the content of Davidsonian charity, against which--in the first instance--my argument levels. I identify Maximization and Threshold Principles in Davidson's early papers, contrast Davidsonian charity with Richard Grandy's Principle of Humanity, and rebut typical arguments for charity principles. In Chapter 3, after identifying two additional Davidsonian charity principles (a Competence and a Compartment Principle) and describing the conception of a module figuring in my argument, I present my argument in schematic form. Then I critique attempts to rebut my argument through excluding modular processes from the scope of normativism (notably, via a personal-subpersonal distinction). In Chapter 4, I develop my argument in detail by describing a module that embodies basic forms of Freudian wish-fulfilment and demonstrating how it violates charity principles. Further, I rebut possible objections to my use of Freudian theory. In Chapter 5, I canvass various models of Freudian phenomena more generally and suggest that a version of my argument can be run with respect to such phenomena too

A therapeutic elimination of “belief” and “desire” from causal accounts of action

This introduction sets out the objectives, topic, method and structure of this thesis. I describe philosophical folk psychology and the roles that it is presumed to play in action choice, interpersonal understanding and reason giving. Philosophical folk psychology – particularly when expressed as belief-desire psychology – is suggested by some as a way to describe all three of these phenomena under a single model. I argue, however, that this comes at the cost of a number of unwarranted commitments which give rise to philosophical problems. I introduce a handful of influential thinkers who have advanced folk psychological positions and also some contemporary examples of philosophers addressing problems arising directly from it. I then introduce the diagnostic-therapeutic intent of this thesis, grounded in a reading of Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy through the later work of Gordon Baker. Thereafter I set out the two-part structure of the thesis and briefly outline the chapters

Belief ascription, metaphor, and intensional identification

This paper discusses the extension of ViewGen, an algorithm derived for belief ascription, to the areas of speech acts, intensional object representation and metaphor. ViewGen represents the beliefs of agents as explicit, partitioned proposition-sets known as environments. Environments are convenient, even essential, for addressing important pragmatic issues of rea-soning. The paper concentrates on showing that the transfer of information in metaphors, intensional object representation, and ordinary, non-metaphorical belief ascription can all be seen as different manifestations of a single environment-amalgamation process. The paper also briefly discusses the addition of a heuristic-based relevance-determination procedure to ViewGen, and justifies the partitioning approach to belief ascription. 1

The interpretation of artifacts : a critique of Dennett's design stance

The Interpretation of Artifacts; A Critique of Dennett’s Design Stance Technological artifacts are a pervasive part of human life. They are, however, largely ignored in the analytic philosophical tradition, especially by philosophical naturalists. Being mind-dependent phenomena, tied up with human intentionality, analytic philosophers have largely found the topic unscientific, not objective, or simply trivial. An important exception is Daniel Dennett, who puts design at the heart of his naturalistic theory of mind

Seeing things as people: anthropomorphism and common-sense psychology

This thesis is about common-sense psychology and its role in cognitive science. Put simply, the argument is that common-sense psychology is important because it offers clues to some complex problems in cognitive science, and because common-sense psychology has significant effects on our intuitions, both in science and on an everyday level. The thesis develops a theory of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology. Anthropomorphism, the natural human tendency to ascribe human characteristics (and especially human mental characteristics) to things that aren't human, is an important theme in the thesis. Anthropomorphism reveals an endemic anthropocentricity that deeply influences our thinking about other minds. The thesis then constructs a descriptive model of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology, and uses it to analyse two studies of the ascription of mental states. The first, Baron- Cohen et al. 's (1985) false belief test, shows how cognitive modelling can be used to compare different theories of common-sense psychology. The second study, Searle's (1980) `Chinese Room', shows 'that this same model can reproduce the patterns of scientific intuitions taken to systems which pass the Turing test (Turing, 1950), suggesting that it is best seen as a common-sense test for a mind, not a scientific one. Finally, the thesis argues that scientific theories involving the ascription of mentality through a model or a metaphor are partly dependent on each individual scientist's common-sense psychology. To conclude, this thesis develops an interdisciplinary study of common-sense psychology and shows that its effects are more wide ranging than is commonly thought. This means that it affects science more than might be expected, but that careful study can help us to become mindful of these effects. Within this new framework, a proper understanding of common-sense psychology could lay important new foundations for the future of cognitive science

Effects of subliminal priming of self and God on self-attribution of authorship for events

Three studies investigated how subliminally primed thoughts of an agent prior to action can affect ascriptions of authorship for that action. Participants competed against a computer program to remove words from a computer screen. Participants reported greater feelings of authorship when primed with first person singular pronouns, and lower feelings of authorship when primed with “computer.” We also investigated whether authorship feelings could be affected by priming subjects with a supernatural agent (i.e., God). Feelings of authorship decreased when participants were primed with God, but only among believers