foundations-grounding-communication
Grounding & Communication Foundations
Scope note — two senses of "grounding": This skill covers the Clark conversational sense: establishing shared meaning between parties (common ground, acceptance evidence, repair). It does not cover the LLM-attribution / RAG sense: whether a generated response is grounded in retrieved documents (citation faithfulness, hallucination detection). For the attribution sense, see ai-rag and the FACTS Grounding / RAGAS / Wallat et al. frameworks (sources FACTSGrounding2025, RAGAS2024, WallatFaithfulness2024 in data/sources.json).
10 canonical grounding-theory primitives for the process by which two or more parties establish enough shared understanding to coordinate. Founded by Herbert Clark and colleagues (1989, 1991, 1996), grounding theory is the most-cited formal account of how interlocutors solve the "do we mean the same thing?" problem efficiently.
It is the missing layer for multi-agent LLM systems: empirical work on multi-agent failures (MAST taxonomy, NeurIPS 2025) identifies system-design specification issues, inter-agent misalignment, and task-verification gaps across 1,600+ traces. Agents often proceed on different interpretations of the same brief. That is not only a coordination problem (information structure); it is a grounding problem (insufficient common ground at handoff). foundations-team-theory tells you whether agents should communicate; this skill tells you how they actually establish shared meaning when they do.