Scaffolding and the Insufficiency of the Intentional Stance as a Conceptual Underpinning for Multiagent Systems
Albert Esterline · 2007
The intentional stance, which has been a conceptual underpinning of much work on multiagent systems, cannot provide an account of coordinated behavior in terms that can apply equally to humans and to agents. We suggest that one must also include social scaffolding in the sense in which “scaffolding ” is used by Andy Clark. Critical aspects of the relevant social scaffolding can be formulated in terms of notions familiar from formalisms that have been applied to software systems and to humans alike. The key feature unifying agent research is viewing computational entities as human-like. The theoretical step justifying this is known as adopting the intentional stance. This paper suggests, however, that the intentional stance