I argue that taking the Practical Conditionals Thesis (PCT) seriously demands a new understanding of the semantics of such conditionals. Practical Conditionals Thesis: A practical conditional [if A][ought(B)] expresses B’s conditional preferability given A Paul Weirich has argued that the conditional utility of a state of affairs B on A is to be identified as the degree to which it is desired u...

There has been relatively much work on practical reasoning in philosophy and artificial intelligence. Typically, such reasoning includes premises regarding means-end relations, but the semantics of such relations is not clear. In this paper, we provide a formal semantics for means-end relations, in particular for necessary and sufficient means-end relations. Our semantics includes a non-monoton...

There are two aspects of practical reasoning which present particular difficulties for current approaches to modelling practical reasoning through argumentation: temporal aspects, and the intrinsic worth of actions. Time is important because actions change the state of the world, we need to consider future states as well as past and present ones. Equally, it is often not what we do but the way ...

This paper examines the traditional architecture of fuzzy expert reasoning and suggests a reorientation, which is simpler, more intuitive, and more implementable. This new approach centers on first determining the degree of satisfaction that a rule applies to the current situation, and then using this degree of satisfaction to qualify the rule’s conclusion. This provides a theoretical basis for...

During the last ten years, agent technology has been widely discussed in various research areas. An agent is a computer system that is situated in some environment, and that is capable of autonomous actions in this environment in order to meet its design objectives. There are at least two kinds of reasoning methods applied in constructing an agent, namely practical reasoning and theoretical rea...

From the very beginning, logicians have counted practical (or action-oriented) reasoning as well as theoretical (or belief-oriented) reasoning as part of their subject. However, despite a tradition that continues to the present, logicians have not produced formalisms that could be considered of any use in designing an agent that needs to act intelligently, or in helping an intelligent agent to ...

Practical reasoning (PR), which is concerned with the generic question of what to do, is generally seen as a two steps process: (1) deliberation, in which an agent decides what state of affairs it wants to reach –that is, its desires; and (2) means-ends reasoning, in which the agent looks for plans for achieving these desires. A desire is justified if it holds in the current state of the world,...