The Cognition of Conflict: Ontology, Dynamics, and Ideology - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 2

Chapter 1
The Cognition of Conflict: Ontology,
Dynamics, and Ideology

Cristiano Castelfranchi

1.1 Premise

What is a conflict? What is the relationship between actors' mental representations
(e.g., beliefs, goals) and the conflicts between them? What is the relation between
contradictions and conflicts and the need for mental coherence?
How to build a systematic ontology of conflicts taking into account objective and
subjective types of conflict, the internal or individual and the external or social? 1
Are there objective conflicts that agents are unaware of? How do they work?
And what is the relation (if any) between individual/subjective conflicts (among
my goals) and social conflicts? Do external conflicts require internalized/mentalized
conflicts? How do we resolve personal or social conflicts?
These fundamental questions will form the basis of a discussion of three crucial
issues:

(a) G rounding the theory and ontology of conflict in cognition .
(b) Conflict and cooperation , the two intertwining faces of sociality, where social
action also aims at changing another person's mind and behavior, not just
adjusting one's own behavior to circumstances or exploiting or blocking the
others' behavior. Sociality is aimed at mind manipulation, influence, and power.
Mind reading is aimed at cooperation, conflict, or both. The same holds for
language/conversation and for argumentation.