Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Intentions are an important concept in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Perhaps the salient property of (futuredirected) intentions is that the agents w h o have them are committed to them. If intentions are to be seriously used in Cognitive Science and AI, a rigorous theory of commitment must be developed that relates it to the rationality of limited agents. Unfortunately, the available theory (i.e., the one of Cohen & Levesque) defines commitment in such a manner that the only way in which it can be justified reduces it to vacuity. I present an alternative model in which commitment can be defined so as to have more of the intuitive properties we expect, and be closely connected to agent rationality. This definition is intuitively obvious, does not reduce to vacuity, and has useful consequences, e.g., that a rational agent ought not to be more committed to his means than to his ends.