Abstract
An adequate formulation of collective intentionality is crucial for understanding group activity and for modeling the mental state of participants in such activities. Although work on collective intentionality in philosophy, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science has many points of agreement, several key issues remain under debate. This paper argues that the dynamics of intention – in particular, the inter-related processes of plan-related group decision making and intention updating – play crucial roles in an explanation of collective intentionality. Furthermore, it is in these dynamic aspects that coordinated group activity differs most from individual activity. The paper specifies a model of the dynamics of agent intentions in the context of collaborative activity. Its integrated treatment of group decision making and coordinated updating of group-related intentions fills an important gap in prior accounts of collective intentionality, thus helping to resolve a long-standing debate about the nature of intentions in group activity. The paper also defines an architecture for collaboration-capable computer agents that satisfies the constraints of the model and is a natural extension of the standard architecture for resource-bounded agents operating as individuals. The new architecture is both more principled and more complete than prior architectures for collaborative multi-agent systems.
Highlights
There is broad agreement in philosophy, artificial intelligence and cognitive science [3, 42, 16, 17, 50, 49, 20, 30, 27, 12] that the collective, joint activity of a group is more than the simple sum of the domain-oriented actions performed by the individuals in that group: coordinating activities, typically including some communicative actions, are required
The participants must be committed to reaching agreement on decisions, and to updating their intentions to be in accordance with the agreed upon decisions; that is, the results of group decisions made in expanding a partial plan to a more complete one must eventually be reflected in the individual intentions of each agent
The Coordinated Cultivation of SharedPlans (CCSP) approach to group decision making in collective activity, as previously illustrated in Figure 2, explains the way in which agents holding GAR intentions constrained by the coordinated-cultivation requirement (CCR) become committed to participating in group decision-making mechanisms
Summary
There is broad agreement in philosophy, artificial intelligence and cognitive science [3, 42, 16, 17, 50, 49, 20, 30, 27, 12] that the collective, joint activity of a group is more than the simple sum of the domain-oriented actions performed by the individuals in that group: coordinating activities, typically including some communicative actions, are required. Several of the accounts taking a plural stance argue further that agreements and the obligations they entail play a central role in distinguishing the mental state required for collective intentionality from that required for individual activity They claim that obligations serve to bind the participants of a group activity together in coordinating and pursuing their collaborative endeavor. In contrast to accounts taking the plural stance, Bratman [3] claims that no new kind of intention is required for characterizing collective action and intentionality and that collaboration can occur in the absence of any initiating agreement or mutual obligation He argues that an interlocking web of beliefs, mutual beliefs and ordinary intentions is sufficient.
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