Narrow Results

It is proposed that any dynamical system with coexisting chaotic attractors has an emergent property. This provides a nonreductive explanation of mental states and their high sensitivity to noise and initial conditions. If metaphysical terms result from the mental states and these are emergent properties of dynamical systems with coexisting attractors, such as the brain, it is suggested that this may provide a physical explanation of metaphysical concepts.

The research of modeling agents is a basic work of agent system and multi-agent system. So far, a large amount of models have been proposed, such as the models based on the mental states (BDI) of Agents, the models based on the function, which maps environment states or percepts to action, and the models based on the game theory. However, almost all of the methods merely model agents from one aspect. Thus, they don’t meet the need of complex social actions of agents. (i.e. coordination, cooperation, negotiation, etc.) Therefore, in this paper, we combine the external environment state with agents’ mental states and utility. And we propose an agent model, in which not only the history of environment and the history of action are considered, but also the mental states and decision utility of agents are considered. The balance between rational consequences and rational decision utility of agents was found out. We improve the models proposed by Russell, Wooldridge, Rao, Xu etc to make the model of agents meet the need of agents’ interaction with others in the complex social environments.

The substitution of knowledge to information as the entity that organizations process and deliver raises a number of questions concerning the nature of knowledge. The dispute on the codifiability of tacit knowledge and that juxtaposing the epistemology of practice vs. the epistemology of possession can be better faced by revisiting two crucial debates. One concerns the nature of cognition and the other the famous mind-body problem. Cognition can be associated with the capability of manipulating symbols, like in the traditional computational view of organizations, interpreting facts or symbols, like in the narrative approach to organization theory, or developing mental states (events), like argued by the growing field of organizational cognition. Applied to the study of organizations, the mind-body problem concerns the possibility (if any) and the forms in which organizational mental events, like trust, identity, cultures, etc., can be derived from the structural aspects (technological, cognitive or communication networks) of organizations. By siding in extreme opposite positions, the two epistemologies appear irreducible one another and pay its own inner consistency with remarkable difficulties in describing and explaining some empirical phenomena. Conversely, by legitimating the existence of both tacit and explicit knowledge, by emphasizing the space of human interactions, and by assuming that mental events can be explained with the structural aspects of organizations, Nonaka's SECI model seems an interesting middle way between the two rival epistemologies.