Basic Mental Attitudes of a Collaborating Agent: Cognitive Primitives for MAS

In this paper, we try to identify the relationships among three main (in our view) proposals of the basic mental attitudes in collaborative problem solving (the Toumela's theory of acting together, in particular the notion of We-Intention; the Grosz and Kraus' theory of collaboration, with special attention to the notion of Intention-that, and the Castelfranchi and Falcone' theory of Delegation-Adoption). We show several overlaps, convergencies, but also complementarities, contradictions and competitions among these theories. The aim of this paper is some clarification and systematisation of the necessary mental attitudes in agents' mind that characterise acting together and cooperating. We will not consider in this analysis other very important mental ingredients of complex forms of collaboration, like agents' motivations in taking part in collective activity, trust, and normative components: permissions, rights, norms, roles, etc.