Shaping Actions and Intentions – Introduction

Abstract

How do actions and intentions come into being and how are they shaped over time? These questions entail an implicit critique of those theories of action that downplay or overlook the processual aspects of actions, such as in cases where our knowledge of our intentions might not or not yet be fully formed. By focusing on this aspect, in particular, this special issue attends to contemporary insights that shed light on the existing theoretical debate on action. According to Elisabeth Anscombe and Donald Davidson, intentions play the decisive role in two respects when it comes to deciding whether something is an action. First, intentions are the hallmark of the description-dependent determination of a behaviour as an action. Actions are events that are “intentional under some description”. Whereas an action can have many descriptions, it is important to Anscombe and Davidson that the agent is aware of some such description that makes her or his doing intentional: “to say that a man knows he is doing X is to give a description of what he is doing under which he knows it”. Second, intentions are the reference point in the rationalization of action. In stating intentions, agents respond to the question: what did you do? Accordingly, intentions function as reasons for actions in the sense that an agent refers to intentions when asked the question “why did you do X?”. Typically, forms of comportment such as bodily reflexes and automatic behaviour are not considered actions, as they are not intentional under any description. When the why-question finds no application, we no longer speak of intentional action. A third reason why intentions are of central importance in the theory of action can be added. According to the standard theory of action, intentions, practical reasoning, and the interpretative principle of charity help us account for the generation of actions. Larger contexts of extended actions can be individualized and understood as units with the help of overarching intentions. In this way, intentions can be used, on the one hand, to constitute actions that have not yet been completed. Thus, I can mark out the unity of an action by saying, for example, “I intend to tidy up my room”. Similarly, we refer prospectively (ex ante) to future units of action, as when we plan to take a trip to Italy, study philosophy, etc. On the other hand, intentions also serve ex post attributions of complex courses of action, such as when we talk about Röntgen discovering Xrays or person A planning to murder and murdering person B, etc. To summarize, according to the standard theory: (i) actions are characterized as doings that are