Intention is commitment with expectation

In the interest of rigorous reasoning about agents and their interaction with environments, much work has been devoted to characterizing the nature of intention and its role in cognition and action. Logicians and computer scientists have developed numerous formal systems capturing various aspects of the philosophically established desiderata for a notion of intention. Philip Cohen and Hector Levesque give perhaps the most famous and venerable formal logic of intention in their paper “Intention Is Choice with Commitment.” However, Munindar Singh has given a profound criticism of that theory, showing, among other things, that under the theory agents can bring about their intentions simply by virtue of having them without necessarily taking action. This work presents an amended version of the original logic, which preserves the advantages of the original while addressing Singh’s criticisms. The motivations for the amendments reveal an oft-ignored desiderata for intention: that action is not intended for its own sake, but rather for an intended outcome. This work is addressed to logicians and computer scientists interested in the formalization of rational agency.