Intention Is Commitment with Expectation- An Amendement to the Cohen-Levesque Theory of Intention

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