What happens to our conception of mind and rational agency when we take seriously future-directed intentions and plans and their roles as inputs into further practical reasoning? The author's initial efforts in responding to this question resulted in a series of papers that he wrote during the early 1980s. In this book, Bratman develops further some of the main themes of these essays and also explores a variety of related ideas and issues. He develops a planning theory of intention. Intentions (...) are treated as elements of partial plans of action. These plans play basic roles in practical reasoning, roles that support the organization of our activities over time and socially. Bratman explores the impact of this approach on a wide range of issues, including the relation between intention and intentional action, and the distinction between intended and expected effects of what one intends. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

In a previous paper we developed a general theory of input/output logics. These are operations resembling inference, but where inputs need not be included among outputs, and outputs need not be reusable as inputs. In the present paper we study what happens when they are constrained to render output consistent with input. This is of interest for deontic logic, where it provides a manner of handling contrary-to-duty obligations. Our procedure is to constrain the set of generators of the input/output system, (...) considering only the maximal subsets that do not yield output conflicting with a given input. When inputs are authorised to reappear as outputs, both maxichoice revision in the sense of Alchourr6n/Makinson and the default logic of Poole emerge as special cases, and there is a close relation with Reiter default logic. However, our focus is on the general case where inputs need not be outputs. We show in what contexts the consistency of input with output may be reduced to its consistency with a truth-functional combination of components of generators, and under what conditions constrained output may be obtained by a derivation that is constrained at every step. (shrink)

In a range of contexts, one comes across processes resembling inference, but where input propositions are not in general included among outputs, and the operation is not in any way reversible. Examples arise in contexts of conditional obligations, goals, ideals, preferences, actions, and beliefs. Our purpose is to develop a theory of such input/output operations. Four are singled out: simple-minded, basic (making intelligent use of disjunctive inputs), simple-minded reusable (in which outputs may be recycled as inputs), and basic reusable. They (...) are defined semantically and characterised by derivation rules, as well as in terms of relabeling procedures and modal operators. Their behaviour is studied on both semantic and syntactic levels. (shrink)