Intentional Stance

Dennett’s strategy of predicting a system’s behaviour by treating it as a rational agent with beliefs, desires and goals. Wooldridge and Jennings argue it is a legitimate abstraction for sufficiently complex software, licensing mentalistic design of agents.

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Backlinks

Intelligent Agents Theory and Practice line 31
Intention Is Choice with Commitment line 27
Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines line 29
Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines line 21

Linked Pages

Strong Agency

Wooldridge’s stronger notion: agents ascribed mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions) and intentional-stance explanations.

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Mental State

Formally specified beliefs, desires, intentions, and commitments attributed to an agent as its program state.

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Intelligent Agents Theory and Practice

Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice

Reference: Wooldridge, M., Jennings, N. R. (1995). Knowledge Engineering Review. Source file: woodridge_intelligent_agents.pdf. URL

Summary

A foundational survey that organizes the agent-based computing field into three tightly coupled concerns: agent theories (formal specifications of what an agent is, often via intentional notions such as belief, desire, intention, obligation), agent architectures (software/hardware designs satisfying those specifications, e.g., BDI, subsumption, layered), and agent languages (programming languages whose primitives embody the theorists’ concepts).

Wooldridge and Jennings distinguish a weak notion of agency (autonomy, social ability, reactivity, pro-activeness) from a stronger AI-centric notion involving mentalistic attributes (knowledge, belief, intention) and sometimes emotion or mobility. They review representational and reasoning formalisms (modal logics for knowledge and belief, intention logics), critique their computational tractability, and survey implementations (AGENT-0, PLACA, Concurrent METATEM). The paper sets the vocabulary used by much subsequent MAS research.

Key Ideas

Three-way division: theory, architecture, language.
Weak vs. strong notion of agency.
Intentional stance justifies mentalistic ascription (Dennett/McCarthy).
BDI and related mental-state architectures.
Survey of 1990s agent languages and applications.

Connections

Conceptual Contribution

Claim: The emerging field of agent-based computing should be structured around the interlocking triad of agent theories, architectures and languages, and tensions between weak (behavioural) and strong (mentalistic) notions of agency should be kept explicit rather than elided.
Mechanism: Wooldridge and Jennings synthesise early 1990s work by (i) defining weak agency (autonomy, social ability, reactivity, pro-activeness) and strong agency (adds belief, desire, intention, emotion, mobility); (ii) surveying modal-logic theories of knowledge/belief/intention and the intentional stance as justification; (iii) cataloguing BDI, subsumption and layered architectures; and (iv) reviewing implemented languages (AGENT-0, PLACA, Concurrent METATEM) and representative applications. Computational tractability of the richer logics is flagged as a central open problem.
Concepts introduced/used: Weak Agency, Strong Agency, Intentional Stance, BDI, Subsumption Architecture, Layered Architecture, Concurrent METATEM, PLACA, Agent Theory-Architecture-Language Triad
Stance: survey
Relates to: Canonises the vocabulary used by Agent-Oriented Programming, Agent Communication Languages - Rethinking the Principles and Trends in Agent Communication Language; its tractability critique anticipates the social-semantic move in An Interaction-oriented Agent Framework for Open Environments.