In a speech community, people utilize their communicative competence which they have acquired from their society as part of their distinctive sociolinguistic identity. They negotiate and share meanings, because they have commonsense knowledge about the world, and have universal practical reasoning. Their commonsense knowledge is embodied in their language. Thus, not only does social life depend...

The intentionality concept can improve the cognitive capacity of software agents, especially if the proposed intentional reasoning engine deals with softgoals at runtime. In this scenario, the use of an intentionality-based technological set to develop agent-driven systems from i* models to code is adequate. In this paper, we propose heuristics to improve the development of agent-driven systems...

Infants and adults are thought to infer the goals of observed actions by calculating the actions’ efficiency as a means to particular external effects, like reaching an object or location. However, many intentional actions lack an external effect or external goal (e.g. dance). We show that for these actions, adults infer that the agents’ goal is to produce the movements themselves: Movements ar...

According to the theory of ‘promiscuous teleology’, we are naturally biased to (mistakenly) construe natural kinds as if they (like artifacts) were intentionally designed ‘for a purpose’. However, this theory introduces two paradoxes. First, if infants readily distinguish natural kinds from artifacts, as evidence suggests, why do school-aged children erroneously conflate this distinction? Secon...

Distinguishing intentional behavior from accidental behavior is a crucial component of social cognition and a major developmental achievement. It has often been assumed that developmental changes in intentional reasoning result from a gradual sophistication in the ability to discern intentions in action. We take issue with this notion, demonstrating that data from cognitive, developmental, and ...

Intentional harms are typically judged to be morally worse than accidental harms. Distinguishing between intentional harms and accidents depends on the capacity for mental state reasoning (i.e., reasoning about beliefs and intentions), which is supported by a group of brain regions including the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ). Prior research has found that interfering with activity in R...

Recent behavioral evidence indicates a key role for intent in moral judgments of harmful acts (e.g. assault) but not impure acts (e.g. incest). We tested whether the neural responses in regions for mental state reasoning, including the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), are greater when people evaluate harmful vs impure violations. In addition, using multivoxel pattern analysis, we investig...

i* modeling has been used to characterize service-oriented computing in terms of intentional concepts such as agents, goals, dependencies, as well as services they provide or consume. The intentional models provide a rich basis for various security related reasoning, such as vulnerability analysis, attack and countermeasure evaluation, risk assessment, etc. In this work, we aim to explore a rea...

The main thesis of this paper is that mental health practitioners can legitimately infer that a patient's given condition is a case of mental disorder without having diagnosed any specific mental disorder. The article shows how this is justifiable by relying either on psychopathological reasoning, on 'intentional' analysis or possibly on other modes of reasoning. In the end, it highlights the c...

We propose a conceptual framework for explaining logical reasoning in terms of competing strategies. Contrary to previous approaches in which a single theory is suggested to explain all logical reasoning, this framework suggests that the core elements of existing theories constitute strategies, each of which have unique processing demands. A strategy is more likely to be used when its processin...