Pragmatic Idealism: Towards a Probabilistic Framework of Shared Awareness in Complex Situations

Shared awareness is an essential concept in the joint decision-making context. Typically, it is oversimplified and associated with shared information. To share an understanding in totality is to say that there is a sharing of meaning and awareness, not only of information. However, existing shared awareness models fail to explain situations in which two people view the same event but attend to different information or act differently based on the same information. Although several categorization models of shared awareness exist, the models are ad-hoc or inadequate to generalization. This paper presents a theoretical discussion of shared awareness based on its cognitive structure. We apply the pragmatic idealism framework, which provides a theoretical construct where the domain of awareness is an abstraction of reality. This framework supports the existence of multiple incompatible perspectives and understandings. We discuss the ontology of this abstract concept with the mathematical tools of quantum probability theory. We discuss the cognitive processes that transform a simple situation into a complex situation. The presented model of shared awareness includes a quantification of the degree of sharing in complex situations.