Abstract
The paper presents a logical framework for the representation of interactions between institutional agents, human agents and software agents. A case study is used to analyze how obligations on institutional agents are “propagated” to human and software agents, and how actions performed by these agents count as actions that satisfy the obligations imposed to institutional agents. It is shown that the relationship between the different kinds of obligations and actions can be represented in terms of the concept of “count as” proposed by Searle, of role and of causality. The logical framework focus on those three concepts.
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Notes
See Chellas (1988) for the satisfiability conditions of normal modal operators and classical modal operators.
If in w′ other agents have performed some actions, it is assumed that in w′′ they have performed the same actions as in w′.
The meaning of the counterfactual condition is defined by Pörn as: “but for i 's action it would not be the case that ϕ”.
Pörn (1977) the worlds u′ related to the world u where we are are defined in that way: “we must consider all those hypothetical situations u′ in which the agent does as much as he does in u”, and that is the reason why the accessibility relation D is assumed to be reflexive by Pörn.
The operators Done and E are added to the language because “counts as” statements refer to actions that have been performed.
A more formal definition of the predicate Holds has been presented by Demolombe and Louis (2006).
This formula is “semi-formal” because it contains a universally quantified variable h which occurs both as an argument of the predicate Holds and as an index of the modal operator Done. To give a formal semantics to this kind of formula is out of the scope of this paper because it would require to go into too long technical details.
See also Sartor (2005) the distinction between the concepts of “counting as” and “emergence” proposed by Sartor.
We have slightly changed the notation to make easier the comparison with Jones and Sergot’s definition.
Balbiani et al. (2008) it has been formally proved that this inconsistency follows from the independence constraint about agents’ choices.
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Demolombe, R. Relationships between obligations and actions in the context of institutional agents, human agents or software agents. Artif Intell Law 19, 99 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-011-9110-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-011-9110-7