Wanting, Intending, and Willing

Abstract

Propositional attitudes like wanting, believing, and intending are complex dispositional states. At least this is what we argued in the previous chapter. In this chapter we shall continue our discussion by an emphasis on the content of the concepts of wanting and, especially, intending. Intending is going to be a key notion in our causal action theory, to be developed in detail in the later chapters. Therefore most of this chapter will be devoted to intendings and willings (or tryings), which are active and executive in- tendings. We have already discussed the nature of wanting sufficiently for our purposes. Beliefs will not be analyzed in detail in this book.¹