Prolegomena to a Theory of Communication and A ect

1 As a step towards comprehensive computer models of communication, and eeective human machine dialogue, some of the relationships between communication and aaect are explored. An outline theory is presented of the architecture that makes various kinds of aaective states possible, or even inevitable, in intelligent agents, along with some of the implications of this theory for various communicative processes. The model implies that human beings typically have many diierent, hierarchically organized, dispositions capable of interacting with new information to produce aaective states, distract attention, interrupt ongoing actions, and so on. High \insistence" of motives is deened in relation to a tendency to penetrate an attention lter mechanism, which seems to account for the partial loss of control involved in emotions. One conclusion is that emulating human communicative abilities will not be achieved easily. Another is that it will be even more diicult to design and build computing systems that reliably achieve interesting communicative goals.