What are goals? And if so, how many?

Goals are concepts used in many different areas of robotics, artificial intelligence, psychology, neuroscience, and also philosophy. Despite the wide usage, there is no common definition of a “goal”. Rather, the term is used in substantially different ways even within disciplines. This paper discusses these notions and potentially unified views on goals, and points out how different perspectives on the same term lead to different arguments and can cause communication difficulties in the interdisciplinary community. We discuss how far goal terminologies can be generally considered as desired end states of action and point out the pivotal aspect of their explicit representation. As a major point we discuss the relation of such goals with reward and value systems from various perspectives.