On Personal and Role Mental Attitudes: A Preliminary Dependence-Based Analysis

Abstract

In this paper, we present some preliminary results concerning the extension of dependence theory [2] and social reasoning [9] to cope with the notion of organizational roles. In order to accomplish this task, we first present a rather informal definition of organization and roles, showing how this additional dimension can be represented within a 3-layered architecture of mental states. We then restrict our analysis to the domain level, by extending our original notions of unilateral and bilateral dependence, as well as that of goal situation, to show that just by representing explicitly the input source of some mental attitudes one can easily explain some interesting social phenomena, like agents’ adequacy to roles and vice-versa. For methodological reasons, we divide this analysis along two main axes, i.e., the inter-agent and the intra-agent dimensions.