Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Wanting composes flexibly with knowing: we can want to know, want to know what someone wants, and so on. This paper offers a goal representation that allows for this type of rich integration with theory-of-mind concepts. We extend the memo programming language (https://github.com/kach/memo), which is specialized for theory-of-mind reasoning, with a new syntactic construct called "wants" that represents goals. To implement "wants," we borrow an idea from programming language theory: the notion of a "continuation," which allows reasoning about possible future states of a program. We show that this construct can be used to represent a variety of interesting goals, and discuss what it can teach us about the concept of desire more broadly.