Towards AI Logic for Social Reasoning

Abstract: AI logic formalizes the reasoning of intelligent agents. In this paper, we discuss how an argumentation-based AI logic could be used also to formalize important aspects of social reasoning. Besides reasoning about the knowledge and actions of individual agents, social AI logic can reason also about social dependencies among agents using the rights, obligations and permissions of the agents. We discuss four aspects of social AI logic. First, we discuss how rights represent relations between the obligations and permissions of intelligent agents. Second, we discuss how to argue about the right-to-know, a central issue in the recent discussion of privacy and ethics. Third, we discuss how a wide variety of conflicts among intelligent agents can be identified and (sometimes) resolved by comparing formal arguments. Importantly, to cover a wide range of arguments occurring in daily life, also fallacious arguments can be represented and reasoned about. Fourth, we discuss how to argue about the freedom to act for intelligent agents. Examples from social, legal and ethical reasoning highlight the challenges in developing social AI logic. The discussion of the four challenges leads to a research program for argumentation-based social AI logic, contributing towards the future development of AI logic.