In this paper we follow the BOID (Belief, Obligation, Intention, Desire) architecture to describe agents and agent types in Defeasible Logic. We argue that the introduction of obligations can provide a new reading of the concepts of intention and intentionality.
Then we examine the notion of social agent (i.e., an agent where obligations prevail over intentions) and discuss some computational and philosophical issues related to it. We show that the notion of social agent either requires more complex computations or has some philosophical drawbacks.
Guido Governatori is a lecturer in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland where he is part of the Data and Knowledge Enginering group.
His research interests include defeasible and non-monotonic reasoning, non classical logic, and applications to normative reasoning, modelling of agents. He was the co-chair of Advances in Modal Logic 2006, and the editor of two special issues on e-contracts.
For more information see: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au