Identity: the Contribution of Contemporary Philosophy to Agent Design

This paper aims to present some perspectives about the agent design research community. Typically in perspective paper we try to understand what the trends are in order to foresee possible future directions. Exceptionnally, instead of looking at where the agent community is going analyzing numerical trends, with this article we want to suggest where agent research could go but is not yet going. During our analysis we discovered that a large part of the agent research community based its work on particular concepts derived from western analytic philosophy based on the logical approach. While applying a pure logic approach could be enough to model interactions for purely artificial agents, we believe that with the advent of mixed environments – i.e. environments involving both humans and agents – we have to focus on a more human-compatible agent design. For this reason in this paper we analyze the identity concept in both, agent design and philosophy focusing on uniqueness, mind, and body, in order to show that other paths could be studied in order to create different directions in agent design.