Intentand

Intentand is a proposed formal construct used in discussions of artificial intelligence, cognitive modeling, and linguistics to describe how multiple intents about an action can be combined into a single evaluable condition. The term blends intent with the conjunction and, signaling that it represents more than a single goal. It is not a widely standardized concept, but it appears in theoretical explorations of how agents manage competing or co-occurring purposes.

In its simplest form, intentand is treated as a binary operator that takes a set of intents I and an action a and yields a truth value indicating whether a can be taken given I. Semantically, a is permissible under intentand(I) if and only if every intent i in I is satisfied in the current context by a's preconditions, outcomes, or by the agent's capabilities and commitments. Some formulations view intentand as a constraint generator, producing a set of feasible actions that satisfy all intents in I. Others treat it as a planning primitive that triggers goal refinement when no single action can satisfy all intents simultaneously.

Applications include multi-goal planning, human-robot interaction, and intent recognition, where users or agents specify a bundle of purposes that must be addressed together. It relates to, but differs from, standard logical conjunction and from notions of obligation or intention in philosophy, highlighting the practical need to reconcile multiple aims within a single action selection.

See also: intention recognition, multi-goal planning, constraint satisfaction, planning under uncertainty.