Relationships between obligations and actions in the context of institutional agents, human agents or software agents

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.