Social evaluation

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The evaluation of an entity x is "a belief of an evaluating agent e about x's usefulness with regard to a goal p".

A social evaluation is a shared judgement by a set (or community) of agents.

Who makes the evaluation?

In many examples, the set of evaluators is clearly characterised by external properties (for example, the set of students gossiping about teachers, the set of parents in their tutor role, the set of agents that have a certain normative goal or a defined skill). Most (but not all) of the agents in the set actually hold the belief in object. To make this definition formal, we will need one of the following support theories.

Probabilistic reasoning

in this case, we would have to define a probability (or a probability range) for agents in the community to hold the belief. While this description is mathematically accurate, it has also little plausibility from a cognitive point of view. Indeed, probabilities are very hard to understand for human reasoning, and they are at the center of several paradoxes of understanding.

Fuzzy logic

here, we would have a degree of holding the belief. This approach seem to suffer from similar shortcomings as the above one.

Default logic

this seems the most promising approach. We are currently trying to formulate our concepts in terms of default logic, where the statement is of the kind "lacking other information, we assume that an agent of the community holds the shared belief".