Communicative Acts

FIPA’s term for the primitive message types (INFORM, REQUEST, PROPOSE, CFP, AGREE, REFUSE, …) whose semantics is defined in SL modal logic over the sender’s beliefs, intentions and feasibility preconditions. Effectively the FIPA-ACL rebranding of KQML’s performatives.

In this vault

Backlinks

ACL Rethinking Principles line 27

Linked Pages

Speech Act Theory

Philosophy-of-language framework (Austin, Searle, Vanderveken) in which utterances perform actions (illocutionary acts) — the semantic backbone of most Agent Communication Languages.

Sources

Foundations Of Illocutionary Logic — Searle & Vanderveken
Three Models for the Description of Language — Chomsky, foundations
Agent Communication And Institutional Reality

Applied in

Performatives

Austin/Searle speech-act tags (inform, request, promise, declare, …) that name the illocutionary force of a message.

In this vault

FIPA-ACL

The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents Agent Communication Language — a standardised successor to KQML, defining performatives with mentalistic semantics (beliefs/intentions of sender and receiver).

Discussed in

ACL Rethinking Principles

Agent Communication Languages: Rethinking the Principles

Reference: Munindar P. Singh (1998). IEEE Computer, December 1998, pp. 40-47. Source file: computer-acl-98.pdf. URL

Summary

Singh surveys the state of Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) such as KQML and FIPA/Arcol, and argues that their dominant mental-agency semantics (defining communicative acts in terms of beliefs and intentions) is conceptually unsatisfying and practically untestable because we cannot read agents’ minds. He proposes a conceptual shift to social agency: ACL semantics should be grounded in a public perspective on commitments, roles, and societies, so compliance with the standard is observable and testable.

The paper maps the ACL design space along two critical dimensions — meaning (perspective, type, basis, context, coverage of communicative acts) and agent construction (design vs. execution autonomy) — and shows how both KQML and Arcol emphasize private, mental-state semantics and thus fail to enable true heterogeneous interoperation. Singh’s alternative emphasizes protocols, roles, and “society management” infrastructure as a richer public substrate for ACLs.

Key Ideas

Mental-agency ACL semantics (KQML, Arcol, early FIPA) cannot be verified without inspecting agent internals.
ACLs need a public perspective, conventional meaning, pragmatics, and full coverage of communicative act categories.
Seven categories of communicative acts: assertives, directives, commissives, permissives, prohibitives, declaratives, expressives.
Social agency replaces BDI with commitments, roles, and societies as the semantic basis.
Dialects/idiolects arise when only private perspectives are considered.

Connections

Conceptual Contribution

Claim: Agent Communication Language semantics must abandon mental agency (beliefs/intentions) and be grounded in a public, social perspective (commitments, roles, societies) in order to be testable and support heterogeneous interoperation.
Mechanism: Surveys KQML, Arcol, FIPA; lays out a two-dimensional design space (meaning × agent construction); shows that mental-state semantics cannot determine compliance; proposes social-agency framework using protocols, roles, and “society management” infrastructure.
Concepts introduced/used: Mentalistic Semantics, Public Semantics, Social Agency, Commitments, Communicative Acts, Verifiable Semantics, Interoperability, Dialects and Idiolects
Stance: critique / foundational
Relates to: Direct antecedent to Verifiable Semantics for ACLs (Wooldridge) which formalises the verification problem Singh names. Sharpens the critique of the mentalistic approach underlying KQML Overview and FIPA-ACL, and motivates commitment-based frameworks such as Agent Communication And Institutional Reality.