Thinking the Social dimension of the Artificial World : Ontological status of Collective Beliefs

This paper deals with the modeling of the social dimension of artificial societies with cognitive agents. We provide a critical review of the ontological status of collective beliefs in some recent works in game theory, using a heuristic diagrammatic framework, useful for MAS design, called the “4Quadrant”. We introduce first a formal presentation of the problem of the “collective” versus “social” dimension of the beliefs, which states the problem more clearly, in particular from the point of view of software design ontology. This raises the problems of the existence of some “social entities” to be able to acquire some relative autonomy with respect to the agents. The “4Quadrant” allows us to discuss, for a given world / system of the ontological commitment and the articulation between both the individual and the collective on the one hand, and between the observable (reifiable) and the subjective on the other hand The last section provides an empirical counterpart, by reviewing and discussing some experiments from behavioral game theory.

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