The Cognition of Conflict: Ontology, Dynamics, and Ideology - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 11

1.3.2 Conflict Dynamics or Processing

An agent cannot - rationally (and consciously) - commit herself to two contradic-
tory goals or beliefs. But there are stages of belief and of goal processing that are
preliminary to any commitment.
Desires need not be either realistic or coherent, whereas intentions do.
The same holds for mere hypotheses with respect to true beliefs:

• Given a conflict between two impossible desires, choice and conflict resolution

are not still required.

• If two conflicting desires must pass into the state of being an intention to be

carried out, one must resolve the conflict and choose. In the postdecision stage,
among current active intentions there cannot be conflicts.

Thus:

(a) There is a conflict only at the same level/stage of processing.

It must be stressed that conflict is not only relative to contexts and beliefs (in a
static perspective); (in a dynamic perspective) it is relative to the level of processing.

(b) The conflict creates a “problem” to be solved (for example, by a choice) only
if the goals (beliefs) are at or should reach a level of processing in which the
agent is required to be coherent and to commit herself to a given belief or goal.

The mind is a coherence-seeking device. It is really remarkable to bring relating
all these cases of contrast to just one and the same relation between the propositional
content to some sort of general principle of “disharmony”:

1. Epistemic contradiction: between beliefs (Bel X P) and (Bel X or Y Not P).
2. Goal “conflict”: (Goal X P) and (Goal X or Y Not P).
3. Discrepancy: cybernetic mismatch in the control cycle between beliefs and goals:
(Goal X P) and (Bel X Not P).

1.3.3 Coherence in Goals and Plans

Goal processing and intention formulation, besides introducing coherence among
active goals, also make our actions and plans intracoherent (the actions of a plan do
not undermine the overall architecture owing to conflicts) and intercoherent (plans
that are simultaneously executed do not undermine each other) (Castelfranchi and
Paglieri 2007 ) (Fig. 1.3 ).
Commitment (in intention formation) is aimed at reducing future possible
conflicts and fostering stability, persistence, and coherence.
In a sense, the “strength of will” also has the function of managing internal
conflicts: it serves to pit me socially against myself, to influence me to choose,
to do, to persist.
In this sense, the mind is a coherence-seeking device: its processing also aims at