A Logic for Desire Based on Causal Inference

Reasoning about desire plays a significant role in philosophy, logic, and artificial intelligence etc. In this paper, we propose an interpretation of “desiring ϕ” based on whether the outcome brought about by “making ϕ true” is preferred by the agent. This interpretation of desire (including conditional desire) is different from the traditional approaches which directly interpret desire as preference. In order to formalize this idea, we construct a desire-causality model by combing the betterness model in preference logic and the causal model in the logic for causal reasoning. We also develop a logic for desire based on this semantics, and an axiomatization for our formal system is given.