Empirical Semantics of Agent Communication in Open Systems
Matthias Nickles, Gerhard Weiß · 2003
The paper proposes a novel approach to the semantics of communication of self-interested and autonomous agents in open systems. It defines the semantics of communicative acts primarily as the observable e#ect of their actual use in social encounters, and di#ers thus fundamentally from mentalistic and current objectivist approaches to the semantics of agent communication languages. Empirical communication semantics enables the designer of agent-oriented software applications as well as agents to reason about social structures on the level of dynamically formed expectations, which we consider to be a crucial capability especially for social reasoning within and about open systems with truly autonomous black- or gray-box agents.