Intrinsic Intentionality

Abstract

Intention is associated with practical reasoning — that is, with our ability to evaluate and select goals, plan means to achieve them, and carry out those plans at appropriate moments. Thus accounts of intention tend naturally to focus on the relationship between actions that are intentional and mental antecedents involved in practical reasoning. Some of these accounts are reductionist: they do not allow for independent mental states of intending, but rather seek to reduce intention to other states, often a combination of desire and belief which, when they cause behavior of an appropriate kind, are held to issue in an intentional action. Theories of this kind tend to overlook important features of intending that distinguish it from desire and belief, and hence have difficulty explaining what it is even to have an intention, much less what it is to act intentionally. Other theories of intention eschew reductionism. They treat practical reasoning as issuing in mental states of intending which differ from desire and belief, and out of which action develops at the appropriate time. These views are able to give a better account of cases where action is preceded by full deliberation, but they too tend to make intentionality depend on a relationship between action and prior states of the agent.