A Representationalist Theory of Intention

Abstract

Several formalizations of cognitive state that include intentions and beliefs based on normal modal logics (NMLs) have appeared in the recent literature. We argue that NMLs are not an appropriate representation for intention, and provide an alternative model, one that is representationalist, in the sense that its semantic objects provide a more direct representation of cognitive state of the intending agent. We argue that this approach results in a much simpler model of intention than does the use of an NML, and that, moreover, it allows us to capture interesting properties of intention that have not been addressed in previous work. 1 Introduction Formalizations of cognitive state that include intentions and beliefs have appeared in the recent literature (Cohen and Levesque 1990a, Rao and Georgeff 1991, Shoham 1990, Konolige and Pollack 1989) . With the exception of the current authors, these have all employed normal modal logics (NMLs), that is, logics in which the semantics of the...