Dear all,
Just a note on Jan's "graph simile". Unfortunately, cognitive agents are "a
bit" more complicated than graphs, so you won't be able use your all-too-easy
implicit-to-explicit conversion of graph representations to invalidate Keith's
point on the presence of implicit but lack of explicit representation of
social structures in methodological individualist multi-agent based social
simulations.
The problem is that a basic principle in MAS is that agent's mental state are
private, so to speak. That is, agents do not have direct access to other
agents' minds. Besides, they may all have incomplete knowledge of the
environment etc., and therefore may have different views on things. Thus,
varying individual views of social properties cannot be reduced/converted (or
it seems so, intuitively, to me) to an objective global - in the sense that is
observable by all agents - "explicit" respresentations of social structures.
In fact, to someone almost illiterate on the social sciences like me, it seems
that there are social institutions of different natures: some are only in the
minds of agents, others are quite tangible (i.e., "real"/objective/globally
accessible).
Rafael
--
Rafael Heitor Bordini, PhD
Department of Computer Science - UFRGS
http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/~bordini
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