On the Role of Cognizance in Responsibility

A novel definition of responsibility analysis based on abstract interpretation has been recently proposed. One of the main distinguishing features of this approach with respect to the existing notions of causality in the literature, is the incorporation of the observer’s viewpoint. Responsibility considers actions as responsible based on what the observer can understand of the behaviors of interest when analyzing the execution traces and concerning the specific capabilities of the observer. While the other existing approaches to causality implicitly refer to an omniscient observer who knows everything that occurred. In this paper, we are interested in further investigating the observer’s role in identifying the responsible action of a given behavior of interest.