Goals and beliefs

I propose a new discourse model that can represent goals, beliefs, and their interrelationships. Using insights about the interpretation of biscuit and canonical conditionals, I demonstrate that the semantic analysis of language objects must account for the co-existence and interaction between these two dimensions: beliefs as attitudes about the way things are; and goals as the intention behind actions, including speech acts. I build on existing theories that already model beliefs, to develop a more complete semantic tool for the analysis and formalization of the pragmatic concepts of goals as well as relevance.