Coherent Social Action

Formal analyses of social action for Distributed A.I. (DAI) have focussed, almost exclusively, on scenarios in which participating agents have a joint intention to act. While such scenarios are significant, there are many examples of artificial and natural social systems in which joint intention not only does not occur, but is not even a practical possibility. This paper proposes that a deep theory of social action should account for the whole spectrum of social action types within the same framework. It is argued that coherence is an attribute which unifies different types of social action, and is therefore a possible starting point for a deep theory. A discussion and subsequent formalisation of coherence is then presented. This model of coherence is used as the foundation upon which to build a new formalisation of team action. The framework in which these formalisations are presented is a new quantified multi-modal logic.