Intentions, Commitments and Rationality

Intentions are an important concept in Cogni-tive Science and Artiicial Intelligence (AI). Perhaps the salient property of (future-directed) intentions is that the agents who 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) deenes commitment in such a manner that the only way in which it can be justiied reduces it to vacuity. I present an alternative model in which commitment can be deened so as to have more of the intuitive properties we expect, and be closely connected to agent rationality. This deenition is intuitively obvious, does not reduce to vacu-ity, and has useful consequences, e.g., that a rational agent ought not to be more committed to his means than to his ends.