Belief Systems and Plans For Communication
Massimiliano Garagnani · 1998
Communication between rational agents can be seen as an exchange of internal concepts expressed using a shared language. Most of the communication acts between humans are performed through Natural Language (NL), and the meaning of the expressions of the language adopted is assumed to be known and properly understood by all of the participants. This suggests that the process of communication using NL requires the source-agent (‘speaker’) to hypothesise a model of its audience’s (‘hearer’) knowledge and beliefs. Moreover, the initial reasons which originate the intention (or need) to communicate (and which may or may not be included in the message) might consist of more abstract perlocutionary goals, such as the induction of a specific reasoning process (inference) within the hearer’s mind producing the change of one or more of his/her beliefs. Since these goals play an important role in the process of determining the content and the structure of a discourse, it becomes necessary for the speaker not only to hypothesise and maintain a model of the hearer’s beliefs, but also to plan the structure of the message according to the effects that the utterances will have upon them. Whilst research in modal logics has produced many theoretical results on the subject of belief systems,