Formalising motivational attitudes of agents: On preferences, goals and commitments

Abstract

In this paper we propose a formalisation of motivational attitudes of rational agents. We deal with three such attitudes, situated at two levels. At the level of assertions we define preferences and goals of agents, at the practition level we define commitments. By providing an awareness-based semantics for preferences we avoid both the side-effect problem and the transference problem, as well as other problems related to logical omniscience. Goals are defined to be those preferences that the agent knows not to hold but to be possible. With respect to commitments we consider both a static and a dynamic aspect. The static aspect formalises the commitments that agents have made, the dynamic aspect formalises the act of making commitments. The resulting theory is a highly expressive one which satisfies many of the desiderata for motivational attitudes.