Abstract
In this paper I study two ways of transforming decision problems on the basis of previously adopted intentions, ruling out incompatible options and imposing a standard of relevance, with a particular focus on situations of strategic interaction. I show that in such situations problems arise which do not appear in the single-agent case, namely that transformation of decision problems can leave the agents with no option compatible with what they intend. I characterize conditions on the agents’ intentions which avoid such problematic scenarios, in a way that requires each agent to take account of the intentions of others.
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Martin van Hees, Johan van Benthem, Richard Bradley and the two anonymous referees of Synthese for detailed comments on the various versions of this paper. The paper also profited greatly from discussions with David Israel, and with the participants at LOII’08 in Hamburg and LOFT’08 in Amsterdam. Financial support from the Conseil de Recherches en Sciences Humaines du Canada, Scholarship scholarship # 752-2006-0345, is gratefully acknowledged.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Roy, O. Intentions and interactive transformations of decision problems. Synthese 169, 335–349 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9553-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-009-9553-5