Re: [ontolog-forum] Intentionality Best Practices

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 4:08 PM, Obrst, Leo J. <lobrst@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

And similarly in the heyday of intelligent agent technology, speech acts were at the basis of KQML, FIPA, etc. The high-end logical agents called BDI (Belief-Desire-Intent) agents of Rao & Georgeff [1] tried to model at least planning aspects.

 

Communication among agents was nearly always speech act-based, with KQML, e.g., having a speech act like ask, tell, etc., associated with an assertional or query packet of knowledge based on some KR language, i.e., rooted in an ontology and knowledge base.

Yes, but also thanks for the references.  What I was unaware of is that, like RM-ODP, some of these agent-based communications models are  based on an ontology for intentionality,  explicating concepts such as community, goal, policy, deontic terms, role, process, etc. in relation to each other, as a foundation for the meanings of different speech acts, thus, I believe, fullfilling what I thought John Bottoms was asking for:

This leaves me with the other issue concerning implementation of an intentionality. Given my view of the framework of an open discussion, it seems like it should be possible to construct a rubric of the Roberts Rules of Order in an ontological style. Maybe that should be the way to proceed.
 

I was responding also to John Sowa's statement that considering intentionality was somehow against the views of professional philosophers during this period, except perhaps for Searle.   I did not find it so.  In the course I took in "Moral Psychology" as a philosophy graduate student at the U of Chicago, that is what it was all about.  This is where I learned about John Austin, on whose ideas Searle so heavily depends.  Even in the philosophy of science there, which was then heavily Karl Popper oriented, intentionality was a topic, and part of the 'death knell for positivism".  I understood positivism to be the foundation for the silliness of behaviorism in psychology.  

 

Husserl, as John Sowa has mentioned, focused anew on intentionality, as part of his general account of phenomenology.

 

In formal ontology and ontological engineering, intentionality is very important for describing and axiomatizing artifacts, e.g., the top-level of the so-called “entity stacking” view of Vieu et al (2008) [2].

 

Thanks,

Leo

 

[1] Rao, Anand; Georgeff, Michael.  1995.  BDI Agents: From Theory to Practice.  Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute, Melbourne, Australia.  In ICMAS-95.    

[2] Vieu, Laure, Stefano Borgo, and Claudio Masolo. 2008. Artefacts and Roles: Modelling Strategies in a Multiplicative Ontology. Formal Ontology in Information Systems, C. Eschenbach and M. Grüninger (Eds.) IOS Press, 2008.

 

 

 

From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of William Frank
Sent: Saturday, May 24, 2014 12:30 PM

To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Intentionality Best Practices

 

The ISO Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing, Draft spec for the Enterprise Viewpoint is based on speech act analysis.

For example,

6.2.2 community object: A composite enterprise object that represents a community. Components of a community object are objects of the community represented.

objective (of an <X>): Practical advantage or intended effect, expressed as preferences about future states.
NOTE 1 – Some objectives are ongoing, some are achieved once met.

6.3.5 process: A collection of steps taking place in a prescribed manner and leading to an objective.

6.5.2 commitment: An action resulting in an obligation by one or more of the participants in the act to comply with a rule or perform a contract.

6.5.3 declaration: An action that establishes a state of affairs in the environment of the object making the declaration.
NOTE – The essence of a declaration is that, by virtue of the act of declaration itself and the authority of the object or its principal,
it causes a state of affairs to come into existence outside the object making the declaration.
6.5.4 delegation:

ITU-T X.911 ISO/IEC 15414

05-10-06

Though intended largely as a means of intention-driven systems specification, there are also executable implementations of these concepts. 

I instituted this work in the late 1990s as chair of the US delegation to RM-ODP.  

In reality, every single thing a computer does is the implicit result of some human intention. This is simply hidden as well as it can be, to the detriment of the quality of the systems get built, as engineers do not feel responsibility for their intentions, or the need to express them, and even to the detriments of our future.

For example, when a funds transfer system is provided with a 'feed' of transactions, each transaction provided is implicitly a speech act request for the system to execute the transaction.  When this system in turn provides a data warehouse with a feed of executed transactions, each of these is implicitly a speech act assertion that these transaction have been executed.   Finally, a query of the data warehouse might ask whether a given transaction has been executed.  Syntactically, the contents of these 'feeds' and queries could be identical.

I wrote a patent application in 1999 for service interfaces comprised of pairs, the first member being a structure that described the speech act, the second being the propositional frame to which the speech act applied, expressed, for example, in XML.

Wm

 

 

 

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 11:20 PM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Leo,

For any subject you can mention, there are many volumes written
about it.  That is one reason why I say that there is no such thing
as a primitive where analysis stops:  it is always possible to do
a deeper analysis.

> I don't know that we can address "intentionality" in any detail
> (see:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/ for a brief,
> accessible discussion). There is just too much.

But don't give up.  As Calvin Coolidge said,

CC
> You can't do everything at once, but you can do something at once.

For example, the difference between 'look' and 'see' is intention.
That's something simple we can start with.

This gets into speech acts, which are all intentional.  In fact,
every "action" is performed by some human or animal for some purpose.
People do represent these things.  Don't give up.

John

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