Intention is choice with commitment

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Abstract

This paper explores principles governing the rational balance among an agent's beliefs, goals, actions, and intentions. Such principles provide specifications for artificial agents, and approximate a theory of human action (as philosophers use the term). By making explicit the conditions under which an agent can drop his goals, i.e., by specifying how the agent is committed to his goals, the formalism captures a number of important properties of intention. Specifically, the formalism provides analyses for Bratman's three characteristic functional roles played by intentions [7, 9], and shows how agents can avoid intending all the foreseen side-effects of what they actually intend. Finally, the analysis shows how intentions can be adopted relative to a background of relevant beliefs and other intentions or goals. By relativizing one agent's intentions in terms of beliefs about another agent's intentions (or beliefs), we derive a preliminary account of interpersonal commitments.

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    This research was made possible by a gift from the Systems Development Foundation, by support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and by support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under Contract N00039-84-K-0078 with the Naval Electronic Systems Command. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representative of the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the United States Government, or the Canadian Government. Earlier versions of this paper have appeared in Reasoning about Actions and Plans: Proceedings of the 1986 Workshop at Timberline Lodge (Morgan Kaufmann, Los Altos, CA), in Proceedings AAAI-87, Seattle, WA, and in Intentions in Communication, edited by P.R. Cohen, J. Morgan and M.E. Pollack (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA).

    ∗∗

    Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

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