cs.AISep 16, 2026

The syntax and semantics of goals

Authors: David M. Abel, Mark K. Ho

Organizations: Department of Informatics University of Edinburgh · Department of Psychology New York University

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Abstract

In both cognitive science and computer science, goals are conceptualized as cognitive states that flexibly combine with world knowledge to organize and specify purposeful behavior. In this way, goals are compositional representations whose content relates to rational behavior. We here draw attention to goals as representations and their content because it highlights a parallel with other areas in cognitive science - in particular, the syntax-semantics interface in linguistics and logic - while also foregrounding foundational questions about the expressivity, design, and efficiency of different goal representations. For example, goals are typically taken as fixed and imposing constraints on desirable behaviors, but we can also identify constraints on goal representations themselves, such as whether a particular goal language is sufficiently expressive to capture behaviors of interest, or whether different goal representations capture the same behavior. Here, we synthesize work that aims to characterize the properties of different goal representations and suggest these are points of a broader design space. We close by discussing how distinguishing the form and meaning of goals can elucidate the implicit assumptions we make about goals, inform the study of interactions between higher-level cognition and motivation, and isolate axes of variation for different conceptions of goals.

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