Editorial Introduction: Logical Methods for Social Concepts

The present special issue follows the workshop Logical Methods for Social Concepts (LMSC’09)1 that we organised from 20th to 25th July 2009 during the European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI’09) in Bordeaux. The aim of the workshop was to understand the potentialities and limitations of logical methods for the analysis of social concepts. Such concepts are central both in the social sciences (e.g. in economics, sociology, social psychology) and in some areas of computer science (multi-agent systems, distributed AI, social software). Examples are the concepts of power, cooperation, responsibility, delegation, trust, reputation, norm, convention, agreement, commitment, etc. More in detail, some fundamental questions that the workshop was intended to raise are the following: