Empirical Semantics of Agent Communication in Open Systems

The paper proposes a novel approach to the semantics of communication of self-interested and autonomous agents in open systems. It defines the semantics of communicative acts primarily as the observable effect of their actual use in social encounters, and differs thus fundamentally from mentalistic and current objectivist approaches to the semantics of agent communication languages. Empirical communication semantics enables the designer of agent-oriented software applications as well as agents to reason about social structures on the level of dynamically formed expectations, which we consider to be a crucial capability especially for social reasoning within and about open systems with truly autonomous blackor gray-box agents.