Norms and accountability in multi-agent societies

It is argued that norms are best understood as classes of constraints on practical reasoning, which an agent may consult either to select appropriate goals or commitments according to the circumstances, or to construct a discursive justification for a course of action after the event. We also discuss the question of how norm-conformance can be enforced in an open agent society, arguing that some form of peer pressure is needed in open agent societies lacking universally-recognised rules or any accepted authority structure. The paper includes formal specifications of some data structures that may be employed in reasoning about normative agents

From Discursive Practice to Logic? Remarks on Logical Expressivism

This paper proposes a novel account of the conditional locution as grounded in practices of goal- directed cooperative dialogue. It is argued that a conditional semantics can be obtained within a language fragment that lacks this locution, but supports assertive, inferential and directive prac- tices. We take Brandom’s logical expressivist programme as a point of departure, but argue that this programme is empirically flawed as it underestimates the pervasive context-dependence of linguistic items including logical vocabulary. We further take issue with his claim that a discursive practice involving only assertion and inference is sufficient for the conservative introduction and deployment of conditional vocabulary. A more promising route is provided by the introduction of directives, as in so-called “pseudo-imperatives” such as Get individuals to invest their time and the funding will follow: this has a conditional sense that if individuals invest their time, then funding will follow. We propose a semantic analysis for these forms which builds on Kukla and Lance’s account of prescriptives, and argue that our analysis more faithfully captures the “irrealis” nature of conditionals. The analysis is presented in terms of an information-state based dialogue model, with the information state comprising a partitioned commitment store. It is argued that our “dialogical” analysis of conditional reasoning is faithful to Brandom’s Sellarsian intuition of linguistic practice as a game of giving and asking for reasons. We conclude by contextualising and situating Brandom’s programme against the larger field of practice theory, by means of a comparison with the works of sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu, and suggest that this com- parison reveals further challenges to the expressivist programme. We also take note of Narasimhan et al’s recent proposals for agent-based modelling of social practice theory as a possible basis for future development

Communication Breakdown? Reasoning about Language and Rational Agents

This paper examines different approaches to rationality in analytic philosophy and AI, in the light of Berm´udez’s proposal that a full account of rationality must aim to explain how agents can both select and explain actions, as well as assessing them against some normative standard. We briefly survey instrumental, linguistic and discursive accounts of rationality, and conjecture that Habermas’s notion of the “three roots” of epistemic, teleological and communicative rationality comes closest to providing a satisfactory account, or at least the ingredients of such an account. This is contrasted with the widely-accepted BDI model of rational agency in AI, which we argue falls short of a full model of rationality and in particular, fails to provide a convincing model of linguistic communication

Complement Anaphora and Dynamic Binding

No abstract

Reasoning, representation and social practice

The idea that human cognition essentially involves symbolic reasoning and the manipulation of representations which somehow stand for entities in the real world is central to “cognitivist” approaches to AI and cognitive science, but has been repeatedly challenged within these disciplines; while the very idea of representation has been problematised by philosophers such as Dreyfus, Davidson, McDowell and Rorty. This extended abstract discusses Robert Brandom’s thesis that the representational function of language is a derivative outcome of social practices rather than a primary factor in mentation and communication, and raises some questions about the computational implications of his approach

Discourse as practice: from Bourdieu to Brandom

This paper investigates Robert Brandom’s programme of logical expressivism and in the process attempts to clarify his use of the term practice, by means of a detailed comparison with the works of sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu. It turns out that the two scholars have a number of concerns in common, including the means by which core practices can be amalgamated into more sophisticated ones, and the possibility of explicating practices with- out distorting them or generating incoherent codifications. We find some congruences between the two approaches but also a number of divergences. In particular, Bourdieu deprecates the well-known dis- tinctions between langue and parole (Saussure), and competence and performance (Chomsky), while (we argue) Brandom ends up instituting his own “competence” model. We conclude by questioning how far this is compatible with his avowed aim of developing an “analytic pragmatism”

Parsing Natural Language using LDS: A Prototype

This paper describes a prototype implementation of a Labelled Deduction System for natural language interpretation (Gabbay and Kempson 1992), where interpretation is taken to be the process of understanding a natural language utterance. The implementation models the process of understanding wh-gap dependencies in questions and relative clauses for a fragment of English. The paper is divided in three main sections. In section 1, we introduce the basic architecture of the system. Section 2 outlines a prototype implementation of wh-binding and indicates its potential for explanation of linguistic phenomena, and in Section 3 we briefly set the model within a larger theoretical perspective, comparing it to other type-logical approaches to natural language analysis.Articl