Abstract
Agent technology is rapidly gaining favor among computer scientists. In typical applications, agents are not viewed as isolated systems, but rather as individuals living in a complex society of other agents and interacting with them, in order to cooperate to the achievement of tasks and negotiate solutions to conflictual situations. Social agents of this kind must be able to entertain mental states not only about their application domain, but also about other agent's mental states; information sharing and communication thus become issues of primary importance. In this paper I define formally a number of mechanisms through which social mental states can be established, and then I analyze such definitions in search of criteria for designing artificial agents.
This research has been funded by the CNR (Italian National Research Council), through grant No. 95.04063.CT11 to Marco Colombetti for the years 1995–96.
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Colombetti, M. (1998). Different ways to have something in common. In: Andreasen, T., Christiansen, H., Larsen, H.L. (eds) Flexible Query Answering Systems. FQAS 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1495. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0055994
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0055994
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