Grounding We-Intentions In Individual Social Attitudes

Abstract

Especially after Raimo Tuomela’s influential work there is now a general agreement, both in AI and in philosophy, on the idea that to model and formalise cooperation it is necessary to model the minds of the involved agents.² I think that this is a fundamental result. However, a collective activity is mainly accounted for in terms of the beliefs of the agents involved about each other and the joint plan. I think that this approach is not sufficient to account for a group or a truly cooperative work because a much richer representation of the individual social mind is needed (Conte and Castelfranchi, 1995). In fact those models provide a limited account of the individual mental states and social attitudes in cooperation. First, — as I will argue — one should explicitly model not only the beliefs about others’ intentions and shares, but also the goals about the actions and the intentions of the others (Grosz and Kraus, 1996): each member not only expects but wishes or wants that the others do their job (Castelfranchi and Falcone, 1998). And conversely one should model the social commitment to the others also in terms of delegation of goals/task and of compliance with the others’ expectations: i.e. as goal-adoption (Castelfranchi, 1991 and Castelfranchi, 1995). Those attitudes are not specific of joint intentions, they can be individual social attitudes and can be unilateral.

I would like to thank Rino with whom I have developed many of these ideas. This paper is in fact the re-elaboration of a joint work presented at MAAMAW’99 (Castelfranchi and Falcone. 1999). A special thank also to Raimo Tuomela for his patient (although perhaps not completely successful) explanations on his subtle, complex, and fundamental theory.