Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Our project concerns the definition of a content theory of action appropriate for agents that act in a multi-agent environment and its implementation in a multi-agent system. Such a theory has to explain what agents know and how they use this knowledge; it has to identify what resources are available to the agents when they must decide on an action; it has to allow agents to reason and engage in concrete activity in their domain. More important for our research, and in contrast with numerous works in Distributed Artificial Intelligence, such a vocabulary must provide a basis for agents to decide and learn when, how or with whom they should cooperate. In this paper we suggest a vocabulary of interactions for intelligent agents. Our vocabulary attempts to do justice to the situated character of action with respect to the disparate but related dimensions of physicality, sociality and experience.