# The Rationale behind the Concept of Goal

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.04021 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04021/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Dec 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Deontic Meta-Rules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12655/) (2022)
- [PolicyKG: An Agentic LLM Pipeline for Translating Institutional Policies into SHACL Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09028/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The paper proposes a fresh look at the concept of goal and advances that motivational attitudes like desire, goal and intention are just facets of the broader notion of (acceptable) outcome. We propose to encode the preferences of an agent as sequences of "alternative acceptable outcomes". We then study how the agent's beliefs and norms can be used to filter the mental attitudes out of the sequences of alternative acceptable outcomes. Finally, we formalise such intuitions in a novel Modal Defeasible Logic and we prove that the resulting formalisation is computationally feasible.