Abstract
Discrepancies between an agent’s goals and beliefs play an important, if implicit, role in determining what a rational agent is motivated to do. This is most obvious in cases where an agent achieves a complex goal incrementally and must deliberate anew as each milestone is reached. In such cases the concept of goal/belief discrepancy defines an appropriate space to which a degree-of-achievement yardstick can be applied. This paper presents soundness and completeness results concerning a logic for reasoning about goal/belief discrepancy, and it is suggested that a certain species of goal/belief discrepancy captures the concept of desire.
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Cross, C.B. The Modal Logic of Discrepancy. Journal of Philosophical Logic 26, 143–168 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1017939604673
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1017939604673