Mental States as Multi-Context Systems

Although Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents have been deeply investigated from both a theoretical and a pragmatic perspective, less attention has been paid to the inherent recursive structure of mental states, which plays an essential role when modelling high level interaction between intelligent agents. This paper tries to capture this property by introducing a multi-context approach to the representation of mental states. A semantics for multi-context formalisms is provided based on the definition of “mental structure”, which is a hierarchical lattice of triangular modules <x,B,D>, where the component x represents the agent x’s mental state as a whole, while B and D represent specifically x’s beliefs and x’s desires. If other mental attitudes, as intention and commitment, are to be considers as primitives, then they can be embodied in the basic module, otherwise they can be represented in terms of beliefs and desires. The old notion of clause is rediscovered in order to facilitate the heavy automated theorem-proving necessary to exploit the potentiality of the formalism for the intelligent interaction with the external environment. The main advantages of this approach are the support for “unconsciousness” and the fact that inferences themselves can be modelled as mental attitudes. Some advanced dynamics of mental states, as the abductive revision of mental states after the reception of a communication, will easily be applied over this formalism.