On normative cognition, and why it matters for cognitive pragmatics

In Cognitive pragmatics: The mental processes of communication (2011), Bruno Bara presents a detailed summary of a theory of human communication, called "cognitive pragmatics,” which he has been developing since the 1980s together with a number of colleagues, and has been presented in several scientific articles and in a recent book (Bara 2010). The basic tenets of this theory are that communication is a cooperative activity, in which human agents engage intentionally, and that for communication to take place successfully all the participants must share certain mental states. Coherently with these assumptions, cognitive pragmatics aims at clarifying what mental states are constitutive of communication, and what cognitive structures underlie the cooperative activities involved in communication. To this position we are strongly sympathetic. However, we think that the theoretical framework currently offered by cognitive pragmatics is inadequate to account for the cooperative nature of human communication. In particular, we believe that to deal with human cooperation, the types of mental states considered by cognitive pragmatics should be extended; that the concepts of conversation and behavior game do not adequately explain the dynamics of human communication; and that the role of communicative intentions is not sufficiently clarified. In this commentary we first discuss the issue of collective activities (Section 1). Next we consider some problems related to conversation and behavior games (Section 2), and bring in the issue of normativity, that we consider as a crucial component of human interaction (Section 3). We then discuss the relationship between communicative intentions and normativity (Section 4), and finally draw some conclusions (Section 5

Interpersonal communication as social action

We compare a number of influential approaches to human communication with the aim of understanding what it means for interpersonal communication to be a form of social action. In particular, we discuss the large-scale social normativity advocated by speech act theory, the view of communication as small-scale social interaction proper of Gricean approaches, and the intimate connection between communication and cooperation defended by Tomasello. We then argue in favor of a small-scale view of communication capable of accounting for the normative effects of communicative acts; to this purpose, we introduce the concept of interpersonal normativity and analyze its relationship with communicative intentions

Interpersonal responsibilities and communicative intentions

When they interact in everyday situations, people constantly create new fragments of social reality: they do so when they make promises or agreements, but also when they submit requests or answer questions, when they greet each other or express gratitude. This type of social reality ‘in the small,’ that we call interpersonal reality, is normative in nature as all other kinds of social reality; what makes it somewhat special is that its normativity applies to the very same persons who create it in their interactions. We first show that interpersonal reality can be accounted for in terms of a suitable concept of interpersonal responsibility, which in turn can be understood as a form of second-personal responsibility (in Darwall’s sense), intentionally co-constructed by two or more agents for themselves. Then we introduce certain significant subspecies of interpersonal responsibility, namely mutual and joint responsibility, and compare them with Gilbert’s notion of joint commitment. Finally we discuss how relationships of interpersonal responsibility can be brought about through communicative acts, understood as actions performed with underlying communicative intentions

Learner models in online personalized educational experiences: an infrastructure and some experim

Technologies are changing the world around us, and education is not immune from its influence: the field of teaching and learning supported by the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), also known as Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), has witnessed a huge expansion in recent years. This wide adoption happened thanks to the massive diffusion of broadband connections and to the pervasive needs for education, highly connected to the evolution in sciences and technologies. Therefore, it has pushed up the usage of online education (distance and blended methodologies for educational experiences) to, even in lately years, unexpected rates. Alongside with the well known potentialities, digital-based educational tools come with a number of downsides, such as possible disengagement on the part of the learner, absence of the social pressures that normally exist in a classroom environment, difficulty or even inability from the learners to self-regulate and, last but not least, depletion of the stimulus to actively participate and cooperate with lectures and peers. These difficulties impact the teaching process and the outcomes of the educational experience (i.e. learning process), being a serious limit and questioning the broader applicability of TEL solutions. To overcome these issues, there is a need of tools to support the learning process. In the literature, one of the known approach to improve the situation is to rely on a user profile, that collects data during the use of the eLearning platforms or tool. The created profile can be used to adapt the behaviour and the contents proposed to the learner. On top of this model, some researches stressed the positive effects stimulated by the disclosure of the model itself for inspection purposes by the learner. This disclosed model is known as Open Learner Model (OLM). The idea of opening learners' profile and eventually integrate them with external on-line resources is not new and it has the ultimate goal of creating global and long-run indicators of the learner's profile. Also the representation aspect of the learner model plays a role, moving from the more traditional approach based on the textual and analytic/extensive representation to the graphical indicators that are able to summarise and to present one or more of the model characteristics in a way that is considered more effective and natural for the user consumption. Relying on the same learner models, and stressing the different aggregation and representation capabilities, it is possible to either support self-reflection of the learner or to foster the tutoring process to allow proper supervision by the tutor/teacher. Both the objectives can be reached through the graphical representation of the relevant information, presented in different ways. Furthermore, with such an open approach for the learner model, the concepts of personalisation and adaptation acquire a central role in the TEL experience, overcoming the previous limits related to the impossibility to observe and explain to the learner the reasons for such an intervention from the tool itself. As a consequence, the introduction of different tools, platforms, widgets and devices in the learning process, together with the adaptation process based on the learner profiles, can create a personal space for a potential fruitful usage of the rich and widespread amount of resources available to the learner. This work aimed at analysing the way a learner model could be represented in visual presentation to the system users, exploring the effects and performances for learners and teachers. Subsequently, it concentrated in investigating how the adoption of adaptive and social visualisations of OLM could affect the student experience within a TEL context. The motivation was twofold. On one side was to show that the approach of mixing data from heterogeneous and not already related data sources could have a meaningful didactic interpretations, whether on the other one was to measure the perceived impact of the introduction on online experiences of the adaptivity (and of social aspects) in the graphical visualisations produced by such a tool. In order to achieve these objectives, the present work analysed and addressed them through an approach that merged user data in learning platforms, implementing a learner profile. This was accomplished by means of the creation of a tool, named GVIS, to elaborate on the collected user actions in platforms enabling remote teaching. A number of test cases were performed and analysed, adopting the developed tool as the provider to extract, to aggregate and to represent the data for the learners' model. The GVIS tool impact was then estimated with self- evaluation questionnaires, with the analysis of log files and with knowledge quiz results. Dimensions such as the perceived usefulness, the impact on motivation and commitment, the cognitive overload generated, and the impact of social data disclosure were taken into account. The main result found by the application of the developed tool in TEL experiences was to have an impact on the behaviour of online learners when used to provide them with indicators around their activities, especially when enhanced with social capabilities. The effects appear to be amplifies in those cases where the widget usage is as simplified as possible. From the learner side, the results suggested that the learners seem to appreciate the tool and recognise its value. For them the introduction as part of the online learning experience could act as a positive pressure factor, enhanced by the peer comparison functionality. This functionality could also be used to reinforce the student engagement and positive commitment to the educational experience, by transmitting a sense of community and stimulating healthy competition between learners. From the teacher/tutor side, they seemed to be better supported by the presentation of compact, intuitive and just-in-time information (i.e. actions that have an educational interpretation or impact) about the monitored user or group. This gave them a clearer picture of how the class is currently performing and enabled them to address performance issues by adapting the resources and the teaching (and learning) approach accordingly. Although a drawback was identified regarding the cognitive overload, the data collected showed that users generally considered this kind of support useful. There is also indications that further analyses can be interesting to explore the effects introduced in the teaching practices by the availability and usage of such a tool

An operational approach to norms in artificial institutions

The notion of artificial institution is crucial for the specification of open and dynamic interaction frameworks where heterogeneous and autonomous agents can interact to face problems in various fields, like for instance electronic commerce, business-to-business (B2B) applications, and personal assistant applications. In our view the specification of artificial institutions requires a clear standard definition of some basic concepts: the notion of ontology, authorizations, conventions, and norms. In this paper we propose an operational approach to the definition of norms that is mainly based on the generation of commitments. These norms can be employed to verify if the interacting agents are behaving in accordance with the normative specification of the system. In particular we regard norms as event-driven rules that are fired by events happening in the system and then modify commitments affecting the agents having a certain role. We will discuss the crucial differences between the notion of authorization and permission and how the notion of permissions, obligations, and prohibitions can be expressed in our model. We will investigate the connections among the specification of different artificial institutions, in particular how an institution can enrich or further regulate the entities defined in another one. Finally we will briefly present the specification of the Dutch Auction Institution and of the Auction House Institution in order to exemplify the model presented in this paper

Conversation and behavior games in the pragmatics of dialogue

In this article we present the bases for a computational theory of the cognitive processes underlying human communication. The core of the article is devoted to the analysis of the phases in which the process of comprehension of a communicative act can be logically divided: (1) literal meaning, where the reconstruction of the mental states literally expressed by the actor takes place; (2) speaker’s meaning. where the partner reconstructs the communicative intentions of the actor; (3) communicative effect, where the partner possibly modifies his own beliefs and intentions; (4) reaction, where the intentions for the generation of the response are produced: and (5) response, where an overt response is constructed. The model appears to be compatible with relevant facts about human behavior. Our hypothesis is that, through communication, on actor tries to exploit the motivational structures of a partner so that the desired goal is generated. A second point is that social behavior requires that cooperation be maintained at some level. In the case of communication, cooperation is, in general, pursued even when the partner does not adhere to the actor’s goals, and therefore no cooperation occurs at the behavioral level. This important distinction is reflected in the two kinds of games we introduce to account for communication. The main concept implied in communication is that two agents overtly reach a situation of shared mental states. Our model deols with sharedness through two primitives: shared beliefs and communicative intentions

Agent communication and artificial institutions

In this paper we propose an application-independent model for the definition of artificial institutions that can be used to define open multi-agent systems. Such a model of institutional reality makes us able also to define an objective and external semantics of a commitment-based Agent Communication Language (ACL). In particular we propose to regard an ACL as a set of conventions to act on a fragment of institutional reality, defined in the context of an artificial institution. Another contribution of the work presented in this paper is an operational definition of norms, a crucial component of artificial institutions. In fact in open systems interacting agents might not conform to the specifications. We regard norms as event-driven rules that when are fired by events happening in the system create or cancel a set of commitments. An interesting aspect of our proposal is that both the definition of the ACL and the definition of norms are based on the same notion of commitment. Therefore an agent capable of reasoning on commitments can reason on the semantics of communicative acts and on the system of norm

Interaction and communication among autonomous agents in multiagent systems

The main goal of this doctoral thesis is to investigate a fundamental topic of research within the Multiagent Systems paradigm: the problem of defining open, heterogeneous, and dynamic interaction frameworks. That is to realize interaction systems where multiple agents can enter and leave dynamically and where no assumptions are made on the internal structure of the interacting agents. Such topic of research has received much attention in the past few years. In particular the need to realize applications where artificial agents can interact negotiate, exchange information, resources, and services has become more and more important thanks to the advent of Internet. I started my studies by developing a trading agent that took part to an international trading on-line game: the First Trading Agent Competition (TAC). During the design and development phase of the trading agent some crucial and critical troubles emerged: the problem of accurately understanding the rules that govern the different auctions; and the problem of understanding the meaning of the numerous messages. Another general problem is that the internal structure of the developed trading agent have been strongly determined by the peculiar interface of the interaction system, consequently without any changes in its code, it would not be able to take part to any other competition on the Web. Furthermore the trading agent would not have been able to exploit opportunities, to handle unexpected situations, or to reason about the rules of the various auctions, since it is not able to understand the meaning o the exchanged messages. The presence of all those problems bears out the need to find a standard common accepted way to define open interaction systems. The most important component of every interaction framework, as is remarked also by philosophical studies on human communication is the institution of language. Therefore I start to investigate the problem of defining a standard and common accepted semantics for Agent Communication Languages (ACL). The solutions proposed so far are at best partial, and are considered as unsatisfactory by a large number of specialists. In particular, they are unable to support verifiable compliance to standards and to make agents responsible for their communicative actions. Furthermore such proposals make the strong assumption that every interacting agent may be modeled as a Belief-Desire-Intention agent. What is required is an approach focused on externally observable events as opposed to the unobservable internal states of agents. Following Speech Act Theory that views language use as a form of action, I propose an operational specification for the definition of a standard ACL based on the notion of social commitment. In such a proposal the meaning of basic communicative acts is defined as the effect that it has on the social relationship between the sender and the receiver described through operation on an unambiguous, objective, and public "object": the commitment. The adoption of the notion of commitment is crucial to stabilize the interaction among agents, to create an expectation on other agents behavior, to enable agents to reason about their and other agents actions. The proposed ACL is verifiable, that is, it is possible to determine if an agent is behaving in accordance to its communicative actions; the semantics is objective, independent of the agent's internal structure, flexible and extensible, simple, yet enough expressive. A complete operational specification of an interaction framework using the proposed commitment-based ACL is presented. In particular some sample applications of how to use the proposed framework to formalize interaction protocols are reported. A list of soundness conditions to test if a protocol is sound is proposed