The Rationale behind the Concept of Goal

TL;DR

This paper redefines the concept of goal as a facet of acceptable outcomes, proposing a formal logic framework to model agent preferences, beliefs, and norms with computational feasibility.

Contribution

It introduces a novel modal defeasible logic to formalize agent outcome preferences and filters mental attitudes, advancing understanding of goal-related concepts.

Findings

Formalization of goals as acceptable outcomes

Development of a computationally feasible modal defeasible logic

Framework for modeling agent preferences, beliefs, and norms

Abstract

The paper proposes a fresh look at the concept of goal and advances that motivational attitudes like desire, goal and intention are just facets of the broader notion of (acceptable) outcome. We propose to encode the preferences of an agent as sequences of "alternative acceptable outcomes". We then study how the agent's beliefs and norms can be used to filter the mental attitudes out of the sequences of alternative acceptable outcomes. Finally, we formalise such intuitions in a novel Modal Defeasible Logic and we prove that the resulting formalisation is computationally feasible.