Interpretive Agents: Identifying Principles, Designing Mechanisms

The present paper takes the position that social action inherently involves meaning and, thus, cannot be adequately modeled without representing the interpretive process among agents. The development of interpretive models is challenging, however, and quickly raises issues of computational tractability. A strategy is developed based on three assumptions (agent focus, continuity reduction and orientation fields) and three mechanisms (prototype inference, orientation accounting, and situational definition). When the three mechanisms are incorporated into an action selection mechanism, they provide a model of the interpretive process of social interpretation with a higher level of verisimilitude than many other approaches.