Intention
An intention is a mental state in which a person commits themselves to a 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 intention while the commitment is the attitude towards this content. Other mental states can have 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 about the intended course of action while unsuccessful intentions fail to do so. Intentions, like many other mental states, have intentionality: they represent possible states of affairs.
Theories of intention try to capture the characteristic features of intentions. The belief-desire theory is the traditionally dominant approach. According to a simple version of it, having an intention is nothing but having a desire to perform a certain action and a belief 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 present the intended course of action as good in some respect, as is the case for desires, but as good all things considered. This approach has problems in explaining cases of akrasia, i.e. that agents do not always intend what they see as the best course of action. A closely related theory 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 and denies the distinction between intentions and actions. On her view, to intend 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 actions seem to come apart, as when the agent is not currently doing anything towards realizing their plan or in the case of failed actions. The self-referentiality theory suggests that intentions are self-referential, i.e. that they do not just represent the intended course of action but also represent themselves as the cause of the action. However, the claim that this happens on the level of the content of the intention has been contested.
The term "intention" refers to a group of related phenomena. For this reason, theorists often distinguish various [|types of intentions] in order to avoid misunderstandings. The most-discussed distinction is that between prospective and immediate intentions. Prospective intentions, also known 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. Immediate intentions, on the other hand, are intentions that guide 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 alternative 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 a certain behavior. Understanding 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 shared intentions. In the philosophy of action, a central question is whether it is 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 determine behavioral intentions. In ethics, the intention principle states that whether an action is morally permissible sometimes depends on the agent's intention for performing this action.
Definition
Intentions are mental states that involve action plans to which the agent has committed themselves. As action plans, they can guide behavior. The action plan constitutes the content of the intention while the commitment is the agent's attitude towards this content. The term "intention" can be used both for prospective intentions, which are not yet executed, and for the intentions guiding the behavior as it happens, so-called immediate intentions, [|as discussed below]. Intending to study tomorrow is an example of prospective intentions while trying to win a game by scoring a three-point field goal involves an act-related intention.Folk psychology explains human behavior on the basis of mental states, including beliefs, desires, and intentions. This explanation is based on the idea that desires motivate behavior and beliefs direct the behavior towards the desired goal. This can be understood in terms of causal chains, i.e. that desires cause intentions, intentions cause actions, and actions cause the realization of the desired outcome.
Content and commitment
Intentions, like various other mental states, can be understood as consisting of two components: a content and an attitude towards this content. On this view, the content of an intention is the action plan in question and the attitude involves a commitment to executing this action. Intentions may share the same content with other mental states, like beliefs and desires. But the different mental states are distinguished from each other concerning their attitudes. Admiring the idea of helping the poor, for example, is different from intending to help the poor, even though both states share the same plan as their content. One difference between desires and intentions is that intentions impose more restrictions on their contents. This includes that intentions are directed at possible courses of action, i.e. that they involve something the agent can do or at least thinks they can do. Desires, on the other hand, do not involve this form of restriction. In this sense, it is possible to desire sunny weather for tomorrow but not to intend sunny weather for tomorrow.A central aspect of intentions concerning the attitude towards their content is that the agent has committed themselves to the plan in question. This is different from merely wanting to do something and thinking that doing it would be good. It is sometimes argued that this commitment consists in an all-out judgment that the intended course of action is good. On this view, intentions evaluate their intended course of action as good all things considered. This aspect stands in contrast to desires, which evaluate their object merely as good in some sense but leave it open whether it is bad in another sense. Someone who is still deliberating whether to perform a certain action, for example, has not yet committed themselves to performing it and therefore lacks the corresponding intention. It has been argued that this form of commitment or being-settled-on is unique to intentions and is not found in other mental states like beliefs or desires. In this sense, intentions may be based on or accompanied by beliefs and desires but are not reducible to them.
Another important aspect of intentions is that they have conditions of satisfaction, like beliefs and desires. This means that intentions are either successful or unsuccessful. An intention that produces the intended action is a successful intention. But if the produced behavior falls short of its goal, the intention is unsuccessful. The content of the intention determines its conditions of satisfaction. Success is usually not fully up to the agent since various factors outside the agent's control and awareness may influence the success of the attempted action.
Intention and intentionality
The meaning of the term "intention" is different from the term "intentionality" even though the two are closely related. Intentionality is the more general term: it refers to the power of minds to represent or to stand for things, properties, and states of affairs. Intentions are one form of intentionality since their contents represent possible courses of action. But there are other forms of intentionality, like simple beliefs or perceptions, that do not involve intentions. The adjective "intentional" is ambiguous since it can refer either to intentions or to intentionality.Theories of intention
Theories of intention try to capture the characteristic features of intentions. Some accounts focus more either [|on prospective or on immediate intentions] while others aim at providing a unified account of these different types of intention.Belief-desire theory
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 manages to account for the fact that there seems to be a close relationship between what one believes, what one desires, and what one intends. But various arguments against this reduction have been presented in the contemporary 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 whether to respond to 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 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 relevant 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.