Asymmetry Thesis and Side-Effect Problems in Linear-Time and Branching-Time Intention Logics

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the relationships between beliefs, goals, and intentions. In particular, we consider the formalization of the Asymmetry Thesis as proposed by Bratman [ 1987 ] . We argue that the semantic characterization of this principle determines if the resulting logic is capable of handling other important problems, such as the side-effect problem of belief-goal-intention interaction. While Cohen and Levesque's [ 1990 ] formalization faithfully models some aspects of the asymmetry thesis, it does not solve all the side-effect problems; on the other hand the formalization provided by Rao and Georgeff [ 1991 ] solves all the side-effect problems, but only models a weak form of the asymmetry thesis. In this paper, we combine the intuition behind both these approaches and provide a semantic account of the asymmetry thesis, in both linear-time and branching-time logics, for solving many of these problems. 1 Introduction Formalizations of intentions and their relationships w...