Instrumental Rationality

Abstract

Comprehensive reasoning from end to means requires an initiating intention to bring about some goal, along with five premisses: a specified means would immediately contribute to realization of the goal, the goal is achievable, the means is permissible, no alternative means is preferable, and the side effects do not outweigh the benefits of achieving the goal. Its conclusion is a decision to bring about the means. The scheme can be reiterated until an implementable means is reached. In a particular context, resource limitations may warrant truncation of the reasoning.

Bibliographical note: This chapter was previously published in Argumentation in multi-agent systems: 7th International Workshop, ArgMAS 2010, Toronto, ON, Canada, May 2010: Revised, selected and invited papers. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 6614, ed. Peter McBurney, Iyad Rahwan, and Simon Parsons (Springer, 2011), 1–11. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011. With permission of Springer. I would like to acknowledge helpful comments on my presentation of earlier versions of this chapter at the Seventh International Workshop on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems (ArgMAS 2010) and at the Seventh Conference on Argumentation of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA). At the latter conference, comments by Michael Gilbert , Hanns Hohmann , Erik Krabbe , Alain Létourneau and Christof Lumer were particularly helpful. I would also like to acknowledge helpful reviews of the paper by Fabio Paglieri for ISSA and by two anonymous reviewers for ArgMAS 2010.