Agent Belief

An Agent Belief is a propositional attitude that is held by a cognitive agent.

• AKA: Mental Belief, Agent Opinion, Propositional Stance.
• Context:
  • It can typically be formed by a Belief Forming Process.
  • It can typically be represented within a Cognitive Processing System (such as a Forebrain).
  • It can typically be a member of a Belief Set.
  • It can typically influence Decision Making Processes within an agent belief system.
  • It can typically serve as a mental representation of an agent belief state.
  • It can typically contain propositional content that an agent considers to be true.
  • It can typically guide agent behavior based on its agent belief content.
  • It can typically be revised through agent belief revision processes when new agent belief evidence emerges.
  • It can typically represent Agent Mental State through agent belief formation process.
  • It can typically influence Agent Decision through agent belief integration mechanism.
  • It can typically guide Agent Action through agent belief application process.
  • It can typically change through Agent Belief Update based on agent sensory input.
  • It can typically interact with other agent propositional attitudes like agent desires and agent intentions.
  • ...
  • It can often influence Agent Decision Making.
  • It can often be expressed through agent communication or agent behavior.
  • It can often be updated based on agent experiences and agent perceptions.
  • It can often interact with other agent mental states such as agent desires and agent intentions.
  • It can often be organized within hierarchical agent belief structures.
  • It can often persist across agent belief contexts unless explicitly revised.
  • It can often exhibit Agent Belief Consistency across agent belief network.
  • It can often be organized in Agent Belief Hierarchy based on agent belief importance.
  • It can often generate Agent Prediction through agent belief projection mechanism.
  • It can often contrast with agent knowledge when representing agent uncertain information.
  • ...
  • It can range from being a Positive Agent Belief to being a Negative Agent Belief, depending on its agent belief valence.
  • It can range from being a Justified Agent Belief to being an Unjustified Agent Belief, depending on its agent belief epistemology.
  • It can range from being a True Agent Belief to being a False Agent Belief, depending on its agent belief correspondence with reality.
  • It can range from being a Strong Agent Belief to being a Weak Agent Belief, depending on its agent belief confidence level.
  • It can range from being a Conscious Agent Belief to being an Intuitive Agent Belief, depending on its agent belief awareness level.
  • It can range from being a Healthy Agent Belief to being an Unhealthy Agent Belief, depending on its agent belief psychological impact.
  • It can range from being a Belief in a Brain to being an Belief in an AI, depending on its agent belief implementation substrate.
  • It can range from being a Factual Agent Belief to being a Normative Agent Belief, depending on its agent belief content type.
  • It can range from being a Simple Agent Belief to being a Complex Agent Belief, depending on its agent belief structural complexity.
  • ...
  • It can have Agent Belief Content that encodes agent belief proposition.
  • It can have Agent Belief Strength that reflects agent belief confidence level.
  • It can have Agent Belief Source that indicates agent belief origin.
  • It can have Agent Belief Justification that supports agent belief validity.
  • ...
  • It can be Agent Belief Explicit during agent conscious reasoning.
  • It can be Agent Belief Implicit during agent unconscious processing.
  • It can be Agent Belief Dormant during agent non-activation period.
  • ...
• Examples:
  • Personal Beliefs, scuh as: self-efficacy.
  • Agent Belief Types, such as:
    • Propositional Agent Beliefs, such as:
      • Agent X has belief: "Person("R2D2") ⇒ False". (a unary relation ground fact).
      • Agent X has belief: "PositiveNumber(-1) ⇒ True". (a unary relation ground fact that is a false belief).
      • Agent X has belief: "GreaterThan(1,2) ⇒ True" (a binary relation ground fact).
      • Agent X has belief: "OPL("E.Coli", "ExbB", "cytoplasmic membrane") ⇒ True" (an n-ary relation ground fact).
    • Natural Language Agent Beliefs, such as:
      • Agent X has beliefs: "happiness is good", "E=mc²", and that the Earth is tubular.
  • Domain-Specific Agent Beliefs, such as:
    • Religious Agent Beliefs, such as:
      • Theistic Agent Belief about the existence of deity.
      • Afterlife Agent Belief about posthumous existence.
    • Health Agent Beliefs, such as:
      • Preventive Health Agent Belief about disease prevention.
      • Treatment Efficacy Agent Belief about medical intervention.
  • Social Agent Beliefs, such as:
    • Belief of Entitlement about social privilege.
    • Belief of Justice about fair treatment.
  • Agent Belief Structures, such as:
    • Atomic Agent Beliefs, such as:
      • Simple Propositional Agent Belief about agent single proposition.
      • Basic Relational Agent Belief about agent simple relation.
    • Compound Agent Beliefs, such as:
      • Network Agent Belief connecting multiple agent belief nodes.
      • Hierarchical Agent Belief organizing agent belief priority.
  • Agent Belief Formation Processes, such as:
    • Perceptual Agent Belief Formations, such as:
      • Direct Observation Agent Belief Formation through agent sensory system.
      • Inferential Agent Belief Formation through agent reasoning mechanism.
    • Social Agent Belief Formations, such as:
      • Testimonial Agent Belief Formation through agent communication channel.
      • Cultural Agent Belief Formation through agent socialization process.
  • ...
• Counter-Examples:
  • Agent Hypothesis, which represents a tentative agent proposition rather than a committed agent position.
  • Agent Instinct, which operates through innate agent mechanisms rather than acquired agent cognition.
  • Agent Desire or Agent Fear, which represent agent motivation states rather than agent epistemic states.
  • Agent Intention, which represents a commitment to agent action rather than a representation of agent truth.
• See: Agent Intention, Agent Counterfactual Statement, Agent Propositional Statement, Agent Knowledge Base, Agent Epistemology, Agent Knowledge Item, Agent Mental Representation, Agent Intentionality, Agent Likelihood, Agent Truth, Belief, Agent Mental State, Agent Reasoning, Doxastic Logic, Cognitive Agent.

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References

2016

• (Wikipedia, 2016) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/belief Retrieved:2016-1-18.
  • Belief is the state of mind in which a person thinks something to be the case, with or without there being empirical evidence to prove that something is the case with factual certainty. In other words, belief is when someone thinks something is reality, true, when they have no absolute verified foundation for their certainty of the truth or realness of something. Another way of defining belief is, it is a mental representation of an attitude positively orientated towards the likelihood of something being true. In the context of Ancient Greek thought, two related concepts were identified with regards to the concept of belief: pistis and doxa. Simplified, we may say that pistis refers to trust and confidence, while doxa refers to opinion and acceptance. The English word doctrine is derived from doxa. Belief's purpose is to guide action and not to indicate truth.

    In epistemology, philosophers use the term ‘belief’ to refer to personal attitudes associated with true or false ideas and concepts. However, ‘belief’ does not require active introspection and circumspection. For example, we never ponder whether or not the sun will rise. We simply assume the sun will rise. Since ‘belief’ is an important aspect of mundane life, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the question that must be answered is, “how a physical organism can have beliefs” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief/).

Oxford Dictionaries - definition published by OUP [Retrieved 2015-08-08]

2015

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief/
  • QUOTE: Contemporary analytic philosophers of mind generally use the term “belief” to refer to the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true. To believe something, in this sense, needn't involve actively reflecting on it: Of the vast number of things ordinary adults believe, only a few can be at the fore of the mind at any single time. Nor does the term “belief”, in standard philosophical usage, imply any uncertainty or any extended reflection about the matter in question (as it sometimes does in ordinary English usage). Many of the things we believe, in the relevant sense, are quite mundane: that we have heads, that it's the 21st century, that a coffee mug is on the desk. Forming beliefs is thus one of the most basic and important features of the mind, and the concept of belief plays a crucial role in both philosophy of mind and epistemology. The “mind-body problem”, for example, so central to philosophy of mind, is in part the question of whether and how a purely physical organism can have beliefs. Much of epistemology revolves around questions about when and how our beliefs are justified or qualify as knowledge.

    Most contemporary philosophers characterize belief as a “propositional attitude”. Propositions are generally taken to be whatever it is that sentences express (see the entry on propositions). For example, if two sentences mean the same thing (e.g., “snow is white” in English, “Schnee ist weiss” in German), they express the same proposition, and if two sentences differ in meaning, they express different propositions. (Here we are setting aside some complications about that might arise in connection with indexicals; see the entry on indexicals.) A propositional attitude, then, is the mental state of having some attitude, stance, take, or opinion about a proposition or about the potential state of affairs in which that proposition is true — a mental state of the sort canonically expressible in the form “S A that P”, where S picks out the individual possessing the mental state, A picks out the attitude, and P is a sentence expressing a proposition. For example: Ahmed (the subject) hopes (the attitude) that Alpha Centauri hosts intelligent life (the proposition), or Yifeng (the subject) doubts (the attitude) that New York City will exist in four hundred years. What one person doubts or hopes, another might fear, or believe, or desire, or intend — different attitudes, all toward the same proposition. Contemporary discussions of belief are often embedded in more general discussions of the propositional attitudes; and treatments of the propositional attitudes often take belief as the first and foremost example.

2013

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology#Belief
  • … epistemology is also concerned with belief in a very much broader sense of the word. In this broader sense "belief" simply means the acceptance as true of any cognitive content. To believe is to accept as true.

2012

• http://rationalfuture.org/glossary.html
  • Belief is confidence in the truth or falsity of a proposition.

• http://ethicalrealism.wordpress.com/philosophy-dictionary-glossary/
  • basic belief – Foundational beliefs that can be known without being justified from an argument (or argument-like reasoning) and without reference to any other belief. For example, axioms of logic, such as “everything is identical with itself,” are plausibly basic beliefs. However, the belief that a banana looks yellow to you could also be considered to be a basic belief insofar as that belief might be justified without reference to any other beliefs. “Basic beliefs” are related to “foundationalism,” and they don’t exist if “coherentism” is true.

2009

• (WordNet, 2009) ⇒ http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=belief
  • S: (n) belief (any cognitive content held as true)
  • S: (n) impression, feeling, belief, notion, opinion (a vague idea in which some confidence is placed) "his impression of her was favorable"; "what are your feelings about the crisis?"; "it strengthened my belief in his sincerity"; "I had a feeling that she was lying"
• http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Belief#Noun
  • 1. Mental acceptance of a claim as truth regardless of the lack of supporting empirical evidence.
  • 2. countable Something believed. The ancient people have a belief in many deities.
  • 3. uncountable The quality or state of believing. My belief that it will rain tomorrow is strong.
  • 4. uncountable Religious faith. She often said it was her belief that carried her through the hard times.
  • 5. in plural One's religious or moral convictions. I can't do that. It's against my beliefs.

2003

• (Gärdenfors, 2003) ⇒ Peter Gärdenfors. (2003). “Belief Revision." Cambridge University Press,

1975

• (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975) ⇒ Martin Fishbein, and Icek Ajzen. (1975). “Belief, attitude, intention and behavior: An introduction to theory and research."

1962

• (Hintikka, 1962) ⇒ Jaakko Hintikka. (1962). “Knowledge and Belief."

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