Michael E. Bratman (1987), Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (viii + 200 pp.); reissued Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1999 — https://openlibrary.org/works/OL55014W
On the citation. The brief’s details are right: author, title, 1987, a book. It has no DOI. The record’s URL is the Open Library work record, the most stable public catalogue entry found.
Key takeaways
Not a reading. What is recorded here is what Bratman’s 2018 essay (LIT-567) cites the book for.
- Intentions are elements of partial, hierarchical plans. They settle practical questions, pose problems of means, and filter options. A prior intention is not a “ghostly hand” that reaches over time. It works by persisting, the 2018 essay citing p. 5.
- Reasonable agents often do not reconsider their prior plans, given the costs and risks of reconsideration. The 2018 essay calls this “a general theme” of the book.
- The “snowball effect”: executing an intention can create new reasons to stick with it (p. 82, as cited).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, as the founding book of the
planning theory that the record’s Bratman holdings rest on. Those holdings
are: Shared Agency (LIT-488) and “Shared Cooperative Activity” (LIT-471),
both Deferred; “Three Theories of Self-Governance” (LIT-596, another
reader’s filing in this batch); Structures of Agency (LIT-590); and
the read essay LIT-567. The book itself is Deferred because it was not
read. The owner allows a long book to be replaced by a shorter lawful work by
the same author. The 2018 essay is that work for the planning theory’s core,
and it extends this book. It gives the theory’s core in a few sentences and
does not replace the book’s own arguments, which is why the book is seeded.
No anthology topic holds it, and it carries no instruction for machine-learning practice. Its theory did travel into AI as the belief–desire–intention (BDI) agent architecture, through Bratman, Israel and Pollack’s “Plans and resource-bounded practical reasoning” (1988). SRI posts a scanned copy of that paper as its technical note 540. It was not read here, because it has no text layer.