Review of Philosophy and Psychology

, Volume 2, Issue 4, pp 767–783 | Cite as

Intentions as Complex Entities

Article
First Online:

Abstract

In the philosophical and cognitive literature, the word ‘intention’ has been used with a variety of meanings which occasionally have been explicitly distinguished. I claim that an important cause of this polysemy is the fact that intentions are complex entities, endowed with an internal structure, and that sometimes different theories in the field are erroneously presented as if they were in conflict with each other, while they in fact just focus on different aspects of the phenomenon. The debate between Gallese’s embodied simulation theory and Csibra and Gergely’s teleological stance hypothesis is discussed as a case in point, and some misunderstandings occurring in that debate are analyzed. The thesis that intentions are complex entities is argued for by shedding light on the following aspects of intentions: conscious control; perceptual (and not only motoric) representations of end-states; attributions of value to those representations; appreciation of the rational relationships between means and ends.

Keywords

Mirror Neuron Mirror System Motor Schema Complex Entity Motor Intention 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Modern PhilologyUniversity of CataniaCataniaItaly

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