This paper explores principles governing the rational balance among an agent's beliefs, goals, actions, and intentions. Such principles provide specifications for artificial agents, and approximate a theory of human action (as philosophers use the term). By making explicit the conditions under which an agent can drop his goals, i.e., by specifying how the agent is committed to his goals, the formalism captures a number of important properties of intention. Specifically, the formalism provides analyses for Bratman's three characteristic functional roles played (...) by intentions [7, 9], and shows how agents can avoid intending all the foreseen side-effects of what they actually intend. Finally, the analysis shows how intentions can be adopted relative to a background of relevant beliefs and other intentions or goals. By relativizing one agent's intentions in terms of beliefs about another agent's intentions (or beliefs'), we derive a preliminary account of interpersonal commitments. (shrink)

This book presents views of the concept of intention and its relationship to communication from three perspectives: philosphy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. The book is a record of a workshop held in 1987.

This paper explores the truism that people think about what they say. It proposes that, to satisfy their own goals, people often plan their speech acts to affect their listeners' beliefs, goals, and emotional states. Such language use can be modelled by viewing speech acts as operators in a planning system, thus allowing both physical and speech acts to be integrated into plans. Methodological issues of how speech acts should be defined in a planbased theory are illustrated by defining operators (...) for requesting and informing. Plans containing those operators are presented and comparisons are drawn with Searle's formulation. The operators are shown to be inadequate since they cannot be composed to form questions (requests to inform) and multiparty requests (requests to request). By refining the operator definitions and by identifying some of the side effects of requesting, compositional adequacy is achieved.The solution leads to a metatheoretical principle for modelling speech acts as planning operators. (shrink)

What is involved when a group of agents decide to do something together? Joint action by a team appears to involve more than just the union of simultaneous individual actions, even when those actions are coordinated. We would not say that there is any teamwork involved in ordinary automobile traffic, even though the drivers act simultaneously and are coordinated (one hopes) by the traffic signs and rules of the road. But when a group of drivers decide to do something together, (...) such as driving somewhere as a convoy, it appears that the group acts more like a single agent with beliefs, goals, and intentions of its own, over and above the individual ones. [more]. (shrink)

The goal of this thesis is to model some of the cognitive structures and processes involve d in how people decide what to say in purposeful conversation. The main concern is to show how a speaker's knowledge of his/her hearer influences what s/he says. Utterances in such dialogues, where speakers can be presumed to be speaking for reasons, can best be viewed as the performance of "speech acts" (e.g., requesting). By modeling the process of deciding what to say as one (...) of problem-solving, we show that the same mechanisms used to plan non-linguistic actions are applicable to planning of speech acts. The methodology of this research employs a computer program that integrates beliefs, goals, problem-solving, and reasoning, with the use of language. The program does this by planning speech acts when it determines that to achieve its situational goals, it needs to influence someone else's behavior. The system is able to plan request speech actrions to influence its user's goals, and inform speech acts to influence his/her beliefs. In addition, it is shown that speech acts can be used to achieve subgoals of other such acts. For instance, in addition to requesting that the user perform some action, the system can also decide to supply him/her with information necessary to performing that action -- information that it believes s/he does not already have. Our model is extendable to the more general problem of planning multiparty speech acts -- ones where actions requested by the speaker involve acts to be performed by parties other than the hearer. [MORE]. (shrink)

Using data from the 1993 Consumer Expenditure Survey to examine housework-related service consumption, the author finds that spending on housekeeping services and meals out—which helps relieve women's housework burden—is affected by dynamics within marriages as well as by family class and race-ethnicity. Other things equal, families in which women have more relative power, as reflected in their income and occupational status, consume more housekeeping services and spend more of their food dollars on meals out, as do wealthier families and white (...) families. Along with housework itself, which is well studied, these results suggest that housework service consumption is also an arena for gendered negotiation and conflict within families, and one way that gender relations vary by class and race-ethnicity. (shrink)

The interconversion of key regulatory proteins between phosphorylated and dephosphorylated forms is an extremely versatile mechanism for reversible altering their activities, and in mammalian cells may be almost as common as allosteric regulation. It is now evident that protein phosphorylation is the basis of a complex network of interlocking systems which allow a variety of hormones and other extracellular signals, acting through just a few second messengers to coordinate biochemical functions.

This collection explores the meaning of maps and of map-making in the modern world.

These essays deal with the scholarly study of the genesis, transmission, and editorial reconstitution of texts by exploring the connections between textual instability and textual theory, interpretation, and pedagogy. What makes this collection unique is that each essay brings a different theoretical orientation-New Historicism, Poststructuralism, or Feminism-to bear upon a different text, such as Whitman's Leaves of Grass , Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, or hypertext fiction, to explore the dialectical relationship between texts and textuality. The essays bring some (...) of the textual theories that compete with each other today into contact with a broad range of primarily literary textual histories. That texts are intrinsically unstable, frequently consisting of a series of determinate historical versions, has consequences for all students of literature, because different versions of a literary work frequently help shape different readings independently of the interpretations brought to bear upon them. Textual instability of the works is relevant to our understanding of how the meanings of texts are generated. The contributors build on the numerous challenges to the Anglo-American editorial tradition mounted during the past decade by scholars as diverse as Jerome McGann, D.F. McKenzie, Peter Shillingsburg, D.C. Greetham, Hershel Parker, and Hans Walter Gabler. The volume contributes to the paradigm shift in textual scholarship inaugurated by these scholars. Index. (shrink)

This article explores the effect of women’s movement into the labor market on the gender segregation of work, using the Current Population Survey from 1972 to 1993. The author includes as working those respondents who were “keeping house” and codes keeping house as an occupation. The results show higher estimates of gender segregation, and slightly steeper declines over time, than were seen in previous studies. Analysis of one-year longitudinal changes reveals less movement out of female-dominated occupations when keeping house is (...) included as an occupation. Finally, a decomposition of the segregation trend shows that the movement of women away from keeping house contributed as much to the overall decline in gender segregation as did the desegregation of paid occupations. The author concludes that the movement of women’s work from the household to the labor market has been a driving force in the changing nature of gender inequality. (shrink)