This symposium explores conceptions of rational agency and their implications for theory, research, and practice. The view that intelligent systems are, or ought to be, rational agents underlies much of the theory and research in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. However, no consensus exists on a proper view of agency or rationality principles for practical agents. Traditionally agents are presumed disposed toward purposive action. However, agent theories abound in which behavior is fundamentally reactive.
Some theories emphasize agents' abilities to manage private belief systems.
Others focus on agents' interactions with their environment, sometimes including other agents. Rationality accounts are equally diverse. Many agent models propose epistemic rationality criteria such as logical consistency or consequential closure. Other agent models base practical rationality on classical or non-monotonic logics for reasoning about action. Such logicist views are now being challenged by decision theoretic accounts emphasizing optimal action under uncertainty, including recent work on decision theoretic principles of metareasoning for limited rationality.