Towards a Formal Theory of Social Roles in Cognitive Computing and Cognitive Informatics

This paper addresses the complicated issue of social roles in a formal theory of cognition as well as in the methodology and implementation of natural language meaning representation in various computational applications. We start with analyzing a specific set of operational and substantive difficulties encountered in processing social roles in computational semantics. While exemplified within a specific approach, Ontological Semantic Technology, these difficulties pertain to any approach that will aim at representing social roles adequately and reasoning with them computationally to emulate human cognition. After relating these difficulties to the long, highly respectable, and torturous pedigree of the issue of social roles in philosophy, philosophy of science, and cognitive science, the paper culminates in an apparently novel idea to establish them, very differently from other ontological concepts, as ontological operators, a sort of triggering mechanisms or meaning procedures, with interesting theoretical and operational consequences and links to such important elements of semantic interpretation as emphasis and focus.