Reasoning about agent deliberation

We present a family of sound and complete logics for reasoning about deliberation strategies for SimpleAPL programs. SimpleAPL is a fragment of the agent programming language 3APL designed for the implementation of cognitive agents with beliefs, goals and plans. The logics are variants of PDL, and allow us to prove safety and liveness properties of SimpleAPL agent programs under different deliberation strategies. We show how to axiomatize different deliberation strategies for SimpleAPL programs, and, for each strategy we consider, prove a correspondence between the operational semantics of SimpleAPL and the models of the corresponding logic. We illustrate the utility of our approach with an example in which we show how to verify correctness properties for a simple agent program under different deliberation strategies

Deliberative Evolution in Multi-Agent Systems

Item does not contain fulltextEvolution of automated systems, in particular evolution of automated agents based on agent deliberation, is the topic of this paper. Evolution is not a merely material process, it requires interaction within and between individuals, their environments and societies of agents. An architecture for an individual agent capable of (1) deliberation about the creation of new agents, and (2) (run-time) creation of a new agent on the basis of this, is presented. The agent architecture is based on an existing generic agent model, and includes explicit formal conceptual representations of both design structures of agents and (behavioural) properties of agents. The process of deliberation is based on an existing generic reasoning model of design. The architecture has been designed using the compositional development method DESIRE, and has been tested in a prototype implementation

Towards a richer model of deliberation dialogue : closure problem and change of circumstances

This research was partially supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant 435-2012-0104. This research was also partially supported by the award made by the RCUK Digital Economy program to the dot.rural Digital Economy Hub at the University of Aberdeen; award ref. : EP/G066051/1. Further refinements of this work were supported by the SICSA PECE scheme.Models of deliberative dialogue are fundamental for developing autonomous systems that support human practical reasoning. The question discussed in this paper is whether existing models are able to capture the complexity and richness of natural deliberation. In real-world contexts, circumstances relevant to the decision can change rapidly. We reflect on today's leading model of deliberation dialogue and we propose an extension to capture how newly exchanged information about changing circumstances may shape the dialogue.Moreover, in natural deliberation, a dialogue may be successful even if a decision on what to do has not been made. A set of criteria is proposed to address the problem of when to close off the practical reasoning phase of dialogue. We discuss some measures for evaluating the success of a dialogue after closure and we present some initial efforts to introduce the new deliberation features within an existing model of agent dialogue. We believe that our extended model of dialogue may contribute to representing that richness of natural deliberative dialogue that is yet to be addressed in existing models of agent deliberation.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Ethics and Practical Reasoning

How is practical reasoning related to ethical reasoning? The most common view is that they are identical: practical reasoning just is ethical reasoning. I criticize this view and then propose an alternative account of the relation between ethical thought and practical thought: ethical reasoning is reasoning about sound practical reasoning. I argue that this account of the relation between ethics and practical reasoning explains various phenomena that more familiar views leave unexplained. It also entails that the philosophy of action bears heavily on ethical inquiry

Aristotle on Virtue of Character and the Authority of Reason

I argue that, for Aristotle, virtue of character is a state of the non-rational part of the soul that makes one prone to making and acting on decisions in virtue of that part’s standing in the right relation to (correct) reason, namely, a relation that qualifies the agent as a true self-lover. In effect, this central feature of virtue of character is nothing else than love of practical wisdom. As I argue, it not only explains how reason can hold direct authority over non-rational desires but also why Aristotle defines virtue of character as hexis prohairetikē