Abstract
This paper uses Participatory Semantics to explicate commitment. Information expresses the fact that a system is in a certain configuration that is correlated to the configuration of another system. Any physical system may contain information about another physical system.
For the purposes of this paper, physical commitment is defined to be information pledgedabout physical systems (situated at a particular place and time). This use of the term physical commitment is currently nonstandard.
Note that commitment is defined for whole physical system; not just a participant or process.
Organizational and social commitments can be analyzed in terms of physical commitments. For example systems that behave as scientific communities can have commitments for monotonicity, concurrency, commutativity, pluralism, skepticism, and provenance.
Speech Act Theory has attempted to formalize the semantics of some kinds of expressions for commitments. Participatory Semantics for commitment can overcome some of the lack of expressiveness and generality in Speech Act Theory.
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Hewitt, C. (2007). What Is Commitment? Physical, Organizational, and Social (Revised) . In: Noriega, P., et al. Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems II. COIN 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4386. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74459-7_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74459-7_19
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