Intention

Intentions are mental states in which the agent commits themselves to the course of action. Having the plan to visit the zoo tomorrow is an example of an intention. The action plan is the content of the goal while the commitment is the attitude towards this content. Other mental states can pretend action plans as their content, as when one admires a plan, but differ from intentions since they do not involve a practical commitment to realizing this plan. Successful intentions bring approximately the returned course of action while unsuccessful intentions fail to do so. Intentions, like numerous other mental states, have intentionality: they constitute possible states of affairs.

Theories of goal try to capture the characteristic atttributes of intentions. The belief-desire theory is the traditionally dominant approach. According to a simple representation of it, having an intention is nothing but having a desire to perform aaction together with a picture that one will perform this action. Belief-desire theories are frequently criticized based on the fact that neither beliefs nor desires involve a practical commitment to performing an action, which is often illustrated in various counterexamples. The evaluation theory tries to overcome this problem by explaining intentions in terms of unconditional evaluations. That is to say that intentions do not just introduced the referenced course of action as good in some respect, as is the effect for desires, but as good any things considered. This approach has problems in explaining cases of akrasia, i.e. that agents do non always intend what they see as the best course of action. A closely related concepts identifies intentions not with unconditional evaluations but with predominant desires. It states that intending to do something consists in desiring it the most. Opponents of this approach have articulated various counterexamples with the goal of showing that intentions do not always coincide with the agent's strongest desire. A different approach to the theories mentioned so far is due to Elizabeth Anscombe together with denies the distinction between intentions and actions. On her view, to mean a goal is already a form of acting towards this goal and therefore not a distinct mental state. This account struggles to explain cases in which intentions and actionsto come apart, as when the agent is not currently doing anything towards realizing their plan or in the issue of failed actions. The self-referentiality theory suggests that intentions are self-referential, i.e. that they do not just constitute the intended course of action but also represent themselves as the cause of the action. But the claim that this happens on the level of the content of the intention has been contested.

The term "intention" refers to a business of related phenomena. For this reason, theorists often distinguish various variety of intentions in formation to avoid misunderstandings. The most-discussed distinction is that between prospective and immediate intentions. Prospective intentions, also invited as "prior intentions", involve plans for the future. They can be subdivided according to how far they plan ahead: proximal intentions involve plans for what one wants to do straightaway whereas distal intentions are concerned with a more remote future. instant intentions, on the other hand, are intentions that assist the agent while they are performing the action in question. They are also called "intentions-in-action" or "act-related" intentions. The term "intention" usually refers to anticipated means or ends that motivate the agent. But in some cases, it can refer to anticipated side-effects that are neither means nor ends to the agent. In this case, the term "oblique intention" is sometimes used. Intentions are rationally evaluable: they are either rational or irrational. Conscious intentions are the paradigmatic form of intention: in them, the agent is aware of their goals. But it has been suggested that actions can also be guided by unconscious intentions of which the agent is not aware.

The formation of intentions is sometimes preceded by the deliberation of promising pick courses of action and may happen in decisions, in which the agent chooses between these alternatives. Intentions are responsible for initiating, sustaining, and terminating actions and are frequently used to explain why people engage in abehavior. apprehension the behavior of others in terms of intentions already happens in early childhood. Important in this context is the role of gestures, pointing, attention, and eye movement to understand the intentions of others and to form dual-lane intentions. In the philosophy of action, a central impeach is whether it is for true for all intentional actions that they are caused or accompanied by intentions. The theory of reasoned action aims to predict behavior based on how pre-existing attitudes and subjective norms creation behavioral intentions. In ethics, the intention principle states that if an action is morally permissible sometimes depends on the agent's intention for performing this action.

Theories of intention

Theories of intention try to capture the characteristic attaches of intentions. Some accounts focus more either on prospective or on instant intentions while others aim at providing a unified account of these different vintage of intention.

The traditionally dominant approach reduces intentions to beliefs and action-desires. An action-desire is a desire to perform an action. On this view, to intend to do sport tomorrow is to have a desire to do sport tomorrow together with a belief that one will do sport tomorrow. Some accounts also hold that this belief is based on the desire: one believes that one will do it because one desires to do it. A similar definition sees intentions as "self-fulfilling expectations that are motivated by a desire for their fulfillment and that represent themselves as such". An important virtue of this approach is its simplicity and its explanatory power. It also continues to account for the fact that there seems to be arelationship between what one believes, what one desires, and what one intends. But various arguments against this reduction have been shown in the modern literature. These often take the form of counterexamples, in which there is both a corresponding belief and a desire without an intention or an intention without one of these components. This is sometimes explained in relation to the idea that intentions involve a form of commitment to or settledness on the intended course of action by the agent. But this aspect is not present in beliefs and desires by themselves. For example, when considering if toto an insult through retaliation, the agent may have both a desire to do so and a belief that they will end up doing this, based on how they acted in the past. But the agent may still lack the corresponding intention since they are not fully decided. it is for also possible to have an intention to do something without believing that one actually will do it, for example, because the agent had similar intentions earlier and also failed to act on them back then or because the agent is unsure whether they will succeed. But it has been argued that a weaker relation between intentions and beliefs may be true, e.g. that intentions involve a belief that there is a chance of achieving what one intends.

Another objection focuses on the normative difference between beliefs and intentions. This is applicable for cases where the agent fails to act according to the intended course of action, for example, due to having a weak will. This type of failure is different from the mere epistemic error of incorrectly predicting one's own behavior. But various belief-desire theories are unable to explain this normative difference. Other arguments focus on the dissimilarities between these states. For example, one can desire impossible things but one cannot intend to do what one thinks is impossible. And whereas beliefs can be true or false, this does not apply to intentions.

Another prominent approach, due to Donald Davidson, sees intentions as evaluative attitudes. On his view, desires are conditional evaluative attitudes while intentions are unconditional evaluative attitudes. This means that desires see their object as positive in arespect while intentions see their thing as positive overall or all things considered. So the agent may have a desire to go to the gym because it is healthy whereas their intention to go to the gym is based on the evaluation that it is advantage all things considered. This theory is closely related to the belief-desire theory explained above since it also includes the idea that beliefs are involved in intentions. Here the belief in question is not a belief that one will do the action but a belief that the action in question is a means towards the positively evaluated end.

This theory has been criticized based on the idea that there is a difference between evaluating a course of action and committing oneself to a course of action. This difference is important for explaining cases of akrasia, i.e. that people do not always do what they believe would be best to do. An example of akrasia is an author who believes it would be best to work on his new book but ends up watching TV instead, despite his unconditional evaluative attitude in favor of working. In this sense, intentions cannot be unconditional evaluative attitudes since it is possible to intend to do one pick while having an unconditional evaluative attitude towards another alternative.

Another theory focuses exclusively on the relation between intention and desire. It states that intending to do something consists in desiring it the most. The claim that intentions are accompanied by desires is generally accepted. But there are various arguments against the claim that intentions are nothing but desires. They often focus on cases where people intend to do something different from their predominant desire. For example, the agent may intend to go to the gym even though they have a much stronger desire to go to the pub instead. This may be the case because the agent thinks that going to the gym is better even though this is not in tune with their desires. Another counterexample comes from cases where the agent has not yet formed an intention even though one desire is predominant. A closely related theory understands intentions as dispositions to act and desires as dispositions to form intentions, i.e. as higher-order dispositions to act.

Most theories of intention see intentions as mental states that are closely related to actions but may occur without the corresponding action in question. Elizabeth Anscombe and her followers give an alternative account that denies the distinction between intentions and actions. On this view, to intend a goal is already a form of acting towards this goal and therefore not a distinct mental state. This means that when one intends to visit the zoo next Thursday, one is already on the way to doing so. An important strength of this account is that it ensures a unified explanation of intentions: it does not need to distinguish between prospective and immediate intentions since all intentions are immediate intentions.

An obvious counterargument to this position is that, in the example of the zoo above, one is not currently doing anything towards realizing this plan. Defenders have rejected this parametric quantity by trying to elucidate how even minimal preparatory steps may already be seen as factor of the action. such(a) steps may include, for example, not creating any other plans that may interfere with the plan in question, like planning a different appointment at the same time at a different location. Another objection is based on the observation that not all intentions are successful, i.e. that one can intend to do something but fail to do it. For example, one may intend to follow the shortest route domestic but take a wrong recast and thereby fail to perform the corresponding action. In such(a) cases, it may be argued that the intention was present whereas the action was absent, i.e. the agent intended to take the shortest route but did not take the shortest route. The opportunity of the two coming apart wouldthat they are not identical.

The self-referentiality theory asserts that one central feature of intentions is that they are self-referential. This means that the intentions do not just represent the intended course of action but also represent themselves as the cause of the action. On this view, the intention to go to the gym represents itself as the cause of going to the gym. One important motivation for accepting a self-referentiality theory is to explain atype of case: a case in which the behavior is just like it was intended, but the intention either did not cause the behavior at all or did not cause it in the correct way. For example, the agent intends to shoot an intruder, is then startled by a moving shadow, which causes their finger to twitch, thereby shooting the intruder. It is often claimed that in such cases, the behavior in question does not constitute an designed action, i.e. that the agent did not shoot the intruder intentionally, despite intending to shoot the intruder and shooting the intruder. This paradox can be solved through self-referentiality theories. The behavior in question is not an intentional action because the intention was not properly realized: it was element of the intention to cause the behavior, which did not happen in the adjusting way. It is ordinarily accepted that intentions have to cause the corresponding behavior in the right way for intentional actions to arise. But the claim that this happens on the level of the content of the intention, i.e. that the intention represents itself as causing the behavior, is often contested. Instead, it has been argued that the content of intentions consists only of the corresponding action plan without representing the intention itself and its causal relation to the execution of this plan.