Abstract
We aim at an adequate formal description of the dynamics of commitments and trust by transferring insights about actual human practices to a formal setting. Our framework is based on Belnap’s theory of agents and choices in branching time (stit theory) and his analysis of commitments in terms of strategies. The main points are that (i) commitments come in various degrees of stringency, (ii) we can define a stringency ordering on an agent’s possible strategies, and that (iii) trustworthiness can be spelled out in terms of strategies: An agent is living up to a given commitment, and thus, is trustworthy with respect to that commitment, if her strategy is at least as stringent as required. Overall trustworthiness of an agent can be defined by averaging over such single case assessments.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Boella, G., van der Torre, L.: A game theoretic approach to contracts in multiagent systems. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics C (to appear, 2006)
Belnap, N., Perloff, M., Xu, M.: Facing the Future. Agents and Choices in Our Indeterminist World. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2001)
Thomson, J.J.: The Realm of Rights. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1990)
Belnap, N.: Branching histories approach to indeterminism and free will (preprint, 2002), http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/documents/disk0/00/00/08/90
Belnap, N.: Branching space-time. Synthese 92, 385–434 (1992)
Prior, A.N.: Past, present and future. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1967)
Thomason, R.H.: Indeterminist time and truth value gaps. Theoria (Lund) 36, 264–281 (1970)
Müller, T.: On the formal structure of continuous action. In: Schmidt, R., Pratt-Hartmann, I., Reynolds, M., Wansing, H. (eds.) Advances in Modal Logic, vol. 5, pp. 191–209. King’s College Publications, London (2005)
Anscombe, G.E.M.: Intention, 2nd edn. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1963)
Anderson, A.R.: A reduction of deontic logic to alethic modal logic. Mind 67, 100–103 (1958)
Müller, T.: Probabability theory and causation. a branching space-times analysis. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 56, 487–520 (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Müller, T. (2006). A Question of Trust: Assessing the Fulfillment of Commitments in Terms of Strategies. In: Goble, L., Meyer, JJ.C. (eds) Deontic Logic and Artificial Normative Systems. DEON 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4048. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11786849_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11786849_18
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-35842-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-35843-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)