PDF What Is a Normative Goal?: Towards Goal-Based Normative Agent Architectures

The generated appeal for added benefits (conditional value) from green consumption would then help accelerate the formation of GGF (Gonçalves et al., 2016). Arguably, a Lewisian convention is not normative; it does, forinstance, not seem to require any prescription to conform being inforce in the community. Even if regularity of use were required for meaning(Davidson famously disputed this; cf. Davidson 1984a; 1986b), suchregularity might not need to be due to either norm or convention. Arelevant observation here is that people, upon reflection, usually canprovide at least rough formulations of the rules or conventions theyare following and cite them as reasons for their actions. But when itcomes to the semantic rules of natural language, this is far frombeing the case; the question would be why. One might think of the “good” as that which is beneficial or helpful and “right” as what is true or just.

This supports previous research (Lee, 2010, 2011), which suggests peers are able to persuade others to be concerned about environmental affairs, follow green norms (Tsarenko et al., 2013), and care about their own feelings, emotions, and self-image in society (Wang L. et al., 2019). To address the current research gaps, this study proposes a research framework using the S-O-R model, which integrates and optimizes the relationships among the existing variables. The proposed framework views social influence (SI) as a multidimensional construct, which encompasses media exposure (ME), family influence (FAI), and peer influence (PEI; Lee, 2010; Ivanova et al., 2019). Lindenberg and Steg (2007) explored the relationship between goal frames and environmental behavior from the perspective of egoistic and altruistic appeals, but they ignored how the individual’s goal frames are activated by the stimuli.

Family members instill egoistic and altruistic appeals simultaneously based on the bounded self-serving and bounded ethicality concepts (Yang and Zhang, 2020). They can actively share environmental knowledge with their relatives, increasing their environmental awareness, and persuading them to adopt healthier lifestyles (e.g., green lifestyle) to avoid environmental harm (Ivanova et al., 2019; Xu et al., 2020). Individuals may then actively seek green product information and continuously improve their green consumption skills. Haryanto (2014) argues that green product knowledge can positively affect an individual’s purchasing decisions, which fully activates their GGF.

1. In standards terminology still used by some organizations, “normative” means “considered to be a prescriptive part of the standard”.
2. This suggests that the environmental crisis effectively activates consumers’ dual appeals, inducing them to purchase more green products to buffer against environmental problems and uncertainties (Xu et al., 2017).
3. Moreimportantly, even if it can be shown that the concept of belief isprimary to that of desire, and of the other propositional attitudes,the question arises whether indeed one could not grasp the concept ofcontent without grasping that of belief.
4. On the secondconstrual, \(S\) has to accept R in some sense not requiring(all) particular uses of \(e\) to be motivated by \(R\).

Ideas like thisare drawn on by a great number of philosophers, including Wittgensteinscholars such as Baker and Hacker or Glock, as well as philosopherssuch as von Wright, Sellars, and Searle. Furthermore, our results also showed that media and PEI simultaneously had a significant positive effect on HGFs and NGFs, while FAI was only significant on HGFs. This finding is consistent with the findings of Lee (2011), who found that media and PEI normative goals meaning affect consumers’ biospheric value. It can thus be concluded that consumers generate convergence motives and comply with social norms under group pressure to achieve self-categorization into the desired group (Hosta and Zabkar, 2021). Similar to the conclusions of Lee (2010), media, family, and peer effects caused consumers to have strong adverse opinions toward environmental problems that shape man-nature orientation (Jiang et al., 2020).

Beliefs, obligations, intentions, and desires as components in an agent architecture

Power should be used to promote the public interest so that those in power use it to benefit the people. Normative political science seeks to understand the meaning, purposes, and goals of politics. It seeks to define how individuals should behave or how institutions should be constituted. Those who study these issues are referred to as political philosophers and share common interests with the broader discipline of philosophy.

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Most existing studies have only explored the influence mechanism of stimulus factors on individuals’ green consumption attitude or behavior based on scattered variables (Ivanova et al., 2019), while human learning and cognitive rules have been ignored. In addition, owing to the divorce of the public information campaign and interpersonal interaction learning, the predictive https://1investing.in/ power of stimuli on complex acquired behaviors (e.g., GPB) has been weakened. While it is a platitude that meaningful expressions havesemantic correctness conditions, it is not a platitude that anexpression is meaningful only if there are these further correctnessconditions. The added notion of correctness, it may therefore beargued, simply does no semantic work.

This study explored the formation of consumers’ green purchasing behavior (GPB) and investigated the moderating effect of sensitivity to climate change (SCC) to address this current knowledge gap. An integrated model merging the Social Influence Theory and the Goal-framing Theory was developed with the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) paradigm. An empirical study was conducted, surveying 583 respondents and analyzing the questionnaire results using structural equation modeling. The results show that media, family, and peer influence (PEI) can effectively activate the consumers’ goal frames. Hedonic and normative goals had significant positive influences on GPB, while gain goals had no significant effect.

Given that thenorms in question are supposed to be essential to meaning/content, wecan already now see that what we are looking for are non-instrumentalnorms of purely semantic provenance. These three types of normative reasoning—emphasizing consequences, rules, and virtue—overlap, but they represent distinctly different ways of thinking about politics and what ideal politics would be like. Although the questions they raise have been studied since ancient times, they remain relevant for us today and are still worthy of careful reflection. Some normative political scientists seek to identify and understand character traits that are admirable in their own right. Rather than arguing that good citizens should tell the truth because lying harms the public interest or violates a universal moral principle, they argue that good citizens should tell the truth because a good person does not lie.

As in the case of meaning, we distinguish between CE normativity,which is neutral on the question how content is determined, and CDnormativity which takes the norms to be metaphysically primary. If \(e\) has meaning, the first disposition suffices to determinewhich meaning it has. Moreover, if both conditions are fulfilled,having the primitively normative attitude of taking the use one isdisposed to make of \(e\) amounts to understanding that \(e\) means\(M\). In standards terminology still used by some organizations, “normative” means “considered to be a prescriptive part of the standard”. It characterises that part of the standard which describes what ought (see philosophy above) to be done within the application of that standard. It is implicit that application of that standard will result in a valuable outcome (ibid.).

Toward a Logic for Qualitative Decision Theory

According to this line of thinking, a government protects its citizens because doing so improves their lives and because it fulfills the duties of government, but also because doing so is what makes a good government. There are several limitations in this study that require further investigation and improvement. First, due to negative interference from uncertainties, such as social desirability bias, measuring real GPB is highly complex and difficult.

Potential Mediated Effects

In addition, to avoid potential environmental harm, consumers may develop preference for green consumption and generate positive emotional motivation, thus avoiding negative experiences and various uncertainties (Lindenberg and Steg, 2007; Wang et al., 2017). In this paper we are interested in developing goal-based normative agent architectures. To answer this question we introduce a qualitative normative decision theory based on belief (B) and obligation (O) rules. We show that every agent which makes optimal decisions – which we call a BO rational agent – acts as if it is maximizing the set of normative goals that will be achieved. Even if guidance normativism would inescapably lead to some form ofregress, one might still hold on to the claim that there arecontentful intentional states only if for instance the rules ofrationality are in force for them.

The results show that the first factor explained about 40% of the total variance, suggesting CMB was not a serious threat. It is quite plausible to read Wittgenstein as here espousing a strongversion of MD normativism.

Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages: A Survey

This subdiscipline of ethics deals with many major issues of the contemporary scene, including human rights, social equality, and the moral implications of scientific research, for example in the area of genetic engineering. For example, “children should eat vegetables”, and “those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither” are philosophically normative claims. On the other hand, “vegetables contain a relatively high proportion of vitamins”, and “a common consequence of sacrificing liberty for security is a loss of both” are positive claims. Whether a statement is philosophically normative is logically independent of whether it is verified, verifiable, or popularly held. With these distinctions in place, we can proceed to mapping thedebates concerning the normativity of meaning/content.

This causes consumers to generate hedonic motives and tend to seek pleasure from pro-environmental behaviors. Arguments from concept grasp, again, typically appeal to the idea thatthere are rationality constraints on concept attributions. As noted inthe discussion of ME normativity, the question has been raised whetherthe idea that there are such constraints coheres with normativism.

The rational actor model has a long and successful history of explaining human motivation across several disciplinary fields, but its focus on material self-interest fails to explain the many courtesies that people extend to each other and the frequent sacrifices they make on a day-to-day basis. I argue that interpersonal trust is supported by normative goals, in that people trust others, even complete strangers, because of a sense of what they ought to do, by social rules and obligations they feel they must follow. In particular, people feel they must respect the character of the other person, constrained to act as though the other individual is an honorable human being, irrespective of what they may privately believe. I describe how respect underlies trust in economic games as well as pro-social behavior in other social settings. If the move is to stop anintentional condition on rule-following from giving rise to a regress,we might end up having to say that every instance of rule-guidedbelief formation requires the unguided formation of at leastone other belief or intentional state.

The S-O-R model, proposed by Mehrabian and Russell (1974), argues that there is a “mediated process” between the stimuli and response and describes the changes in the recipient’s psychological state after receiving external stimuli (Choi and Kandampully, 2019). The S-O-R model was one of the earliest frameworks used in exploring the impact of various stimuli on pro-environmental behavior (e.g., Su and Swanson, 2017; Choi and Kandampully, 2019). In this model, stimulus (S), which is based on context and object, is the sum of all external driving factors without a specific range. For the organism (O), aroused motivations are indicated by psychological activities, while the individual’s behavioral outcome (R) denotes GPB. Actually, most scholars agree that the existing theories are imperfect (Kim and Hwang, 2020), and a number of criticisms have been raised (Kiatkawsin and Han, 2017).