Group Conflict as Social Contradiction - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 33

for understanding and defining notions such as group information, group choice,
and group intention. (Brandt et al. 2013 ).
SCT views groups as collectives of individuals that may have different
preferences, opinions, desires, who have to decide and agree on a single
collective stance. An example of such a group is given by a parliament in which
the representatives may express a number of divergent positions and who settle
the possible disagreement by voting. Moreover, the members of the board of
stakeholders of a corporation who decide possible courses of action can be analyzed
by means of SCT. More generally, any assembly of individuals that agree on the
procedure to settle disagreement can be studied by means of social choice theoretic
methods. An important difference that we want to stress is that SCT takes a different
perspective on groups with respect to Game Theory (Neumann and Morgenstern
1944 ; Osborne and Rubinstein 1994 ). SCT is interested in the behavior of the
group as a single entity, whereas the focus of game theory is on the interaction
of a number of self-interested agents. In this sense, the notion of group that SCT
defines and investigates imposes a strict form of social cohesion. Although SCT
presupposes at least the implicit agreement on the procedure to settle disagreement,
due to the variety of aggregation procedures that can be defined and discussed,
SCT methods can deal with a wide spectrum of groups, such as parliaments,
organizations, corporations, assemblies, and associations. SCT can be considered
as a general theory of the aggregation of propositional attitudes in the philosophical
sense, i.e. beliefs, desires, intentions, preferences, judgments. Once we are capable
of modelling such attitudes in a clear formal language, we can define and evaluate
the proper aggregation procedures by means of SCT techniques (Dietrich and List
2009 ). Moreover, SCT has been applied to model groups' intentions, for example
in Boella et al. ( 2011 ).
It is important to make the level of our analysis explicit: We are interested
in knowledge representation and in particular we propose a formal and general
methodology to represent conflicts. We assume that conflicts are always about
something. Thus, we shall introduce a formal language to represent possible matters
of conflicts, such as preferences, beliefs, judgments, desires, goals, and intentions.
We shall then propose an abstract notion of conflict between matters by using the
formal concept of contradiction between the formal representations of the matter
of conflict. For example, a conflict of opinions is represented by the contradiction
between a proposition A and a proposition not A , an actual conflict that may emerge
between two agents concerning their opinions can be described by assuming that an
agent is claiming A whereas the other agent is claiming not A .
The motivation for using SCT in analyzing conflict is that it allows for singling
out a peculiar notion of conflict of groups. Although it may seem at first that the
agreement forced by SCT on the procedure to settle possible conflicts is sufficient
for guaranteeing that any conflict among the members of the group can be settled,
quite surprisingly, this is not the case. There are situations such that although
the individuals that are members of the group agree on the norms or procedures
that settle possible conflicts between individuals, nevertheless the actions, beliefs,
judgments, preferences of the group turn out to be in a peculiar situation of conflict,