Group Conflict as Social Contradiction - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 46

Moreover, the existence of a social agentive group depends on an aggregation
procedure in the following sense. We assume as a necessary condition that an agen-
tive group is correlated to a group of individuals as well as to an aggregation
procedure. 6
SAG.g/ !9f; 9N AGG.f / ^ GRP.N/ ^8i.MEMB.i;N/ ! ACK.i;f //
(2.1)
Definition ( 2.1 ) means that an agentive group g depends on a group of individuals
N and an aggregation procedure f such that every individual in the group
acknowledges f . Since the category of groups GRP and the category of agentive
social objects ASO are disjoint, we are assuming that the set of individuals and the
agentive social group are distinct objects of our ontology.
There are further conditions on social agentive groups, for example, given a
social agentive group g , there is a unique aggregation procedure for g at a given
time.
In order to simplify the presentation of social agentive groups and to focus on
conflict, we abstract here from issues related to time and change (Porello et al.
2014 ). 7
The acknowledgment relation is here intentionally designed to be abstract
because it may be subject to different interpretations depending on the type of group
and individual agents. For example, members of an organization subscribe the rules
of the organization, employees sign the employment contract, representatives of
the parliament are bound by oath to the constitution, and so on. The properties of
aggregation procedures that we have introduced in Sect. 2.3 maybeusedinorder
to define under which conditions an agent is willing to accept an aggregation
procedure, in less institutionalized cases; for example, an anonymous aggregation
procedure can be accepted on the ground that it ensures a form of impartiality.
Here we assume, according to our previous analysis, that the acknowledgment
of the aggregation procedure entails the individual agreement on the reasoning
framework L A that is used to judge conflicts. This is because an aggregation
procedure is defined on a specific input which takes propositional attitudes that
6 For a precise ontological treatment of the agency of groups, we refer to Porello et al. ( 2014 ).
7 For example, we may discuss whether a social agentive group remains the same by adding or
removing members of the set of individuals or by reforming the aggregation procedure. For this
reason, we did not put the unicity constraint on N and f in Definition ( 2.1 ). Moreover, by viewing
social agentive group with respect to time, the acknowledgment relation has to be parametrized
wrt times as well. One application of a time-dependent acknowledgment relation is that, in order
to reform the aggregation procedure at a certain moment, a new acknowledgment may be required.
However, at a time slice, the group and the procedure are supposed to be unique. This is motivated
by the simple observation that if we were to allow for two different aggregation procedures at
a given time, with possibly divergent outcomes, the attitudes of the social agentive group would
always be indeterminate.