DIAGNÓSTICO

Right at the beginning of Intention, Anscombe observes that there are three common ways in which we employ the concept intention:

1. The agent intends to G (verb)

2. The agent G’d intentionally (adverb)

3. The agent F’d with the intention of Ging (noun)

The first use of the concept (1), which Anscombe defines as intention-for-the-future or prospective intention, refers to the fact that we commonly say “I intend to do X at time Y,” where Y is still to come. I can have such an intention for a very long time before I take any actions to bring about X; for example: as a sixteen year old I may intend to become president one day, and even though I take no immediate action towards that goal until I am considerably older, it remains the case that I intend to do so (become president). Conversely, prospective intentions could be only very slightly anterior to the performance of action, such as forming the intention to scratch my back and doing so (almost) immediately. As will become clear, there is much contestation about exactly when such an intention can be said to be present, and whether the presence of such intention requires that some action takes place at some point. For example, if I never actually take steps to become president, can I ever be said to have had the intention of doing so? It seems obvious that the intention entails a sense of commitment, but must that commitment manifest in action for it to qualify as such?

The second use (2) refers to intentional action, meaning that we identify a given action as taking place due to human agency of a certain sort, as opposed to by accident or due to forces of nature external to the agent. For example: I lift my hand intentionally as opposed to it being lifted by somebody else, or it being lifted due to an involuntary reflex. It has been this use that I have focussed on, and for the reasons

outlined in Section 1.4. I will be speaking of intentional activity, rather than intentional action to refer to this use from here on. It is this use of intention that is most frequently rejected from the unity. That is, several thinkers argue that whether or not an activity is intentional is not necessarily conceptually related to whether the agent had an intention.46 _{I take the question of what exactly is required for some}

activity to count as intentional – that is, what is meant by human agency of a certain sort – to be the most important question that an account of intentional activity must answer, and I take the answer to be the presence of a certain kind of control: System 2 Oversight.

The third use (3) is intention-with-which, i.e. the intention I have when performing an action. This use of intention is often used in a teleological sense; that is, it is used to describe an action as directed toward the achievement of a certain goal. For example: I am reading an article by Donald Davidson because I want to better structure my analysis of his arguments.

The problem is that these three uses seem to be “not equivocal,” and our inability to explain the rules underlying the use of the term “intention” in these three different ways reflects that “we are pretty much in the dark about the character of the concept which it represents” (Anscombe, 1963: 1). Until these underlying rules are understood – or until we are presented with good reasons to dismiss the intuition that they are related – a holistic theory of the concept intention that can convincingly account for all three uses is unachievable. For this reason, addressing the disparities in our use of the term remains one of the fundamental requirements of any convincing theory of any one of the uses of the concept intention. And thus, as my aim is to present a

46 _{Much of the support for this view in recent times has stemmed from a series of experiments}

conducted by Joshua Knobe (2003; 2004) together with Arudra Burra (2006), which are commonly interpreted as showing that folk attributions of “intention” and “intentionally” come apart. I will not be presenting my arguments against Knobe and Burra’s conclusions here. However, I will briefly state that I do not take their experimental results to unequivocally support the conclusions that are derived from them, and that by adopting a wide-fit view of the relationship between intentions and intentional actions it is possible to account for the discrepancy that they identify in the attributions. Furthermore, their argument that the moral valence of an action influences attributions of positive intentional status to actions, but not attributions of intention, can be explained by the “pragmatic considerations” (Adams and Steadman 2004 and Adams 2006) – indeed, I take Jennifer Nado to present a compelling account of how these considerations might “unduly” influence out attributions of positive intentional status in her 2008 work Effects of Moral Cognition on Judgements of Intentionality.

convincing account of intentional activity, it behoves me to lay-out my proposal for such a unity.

However, to complicate matters even further, Wilson and Shpall (2012) contend that there is an additional use of intention for which Anscombe had failed to account. They state this use to be the following: (1) “in Fing (by Fing), the agent intended to

G”, which they argue is related to but distinct from intention-with-which. Given that the most basic expression of intention-with-which is: “the agent Fed with the intention of Ging,” they employ the following example to illustrate their point:

[A]lthough it may be true that

(8) Veronica mopped the kitchen then with the intention of feeding her flamingo afterwards,

it normally won't be true that

(8’) In (by) mopping the kitchen, Veronica intended to feed her flamingo afterwards.

The irreconcilable nature of these two statements is meant to show that the latter use of intention must be considered distinct from the first, and so should be added to Anscombe’s list of uses. However, this would be a mistake. In both examples the two intentions – mopping the floor and feeding the flamingo – are separate intentions, and so what is at stake here is not some new use that seems close to a case of intention- with-which, but rather a statement that includes an intention-for-the-future and an intentional action. The action of mopping the floor does not bring about or aid the progress of the action of feeding the flamingo, or if it does then the statement (8’) would not be problematic in the sense Wilson and Shpall take it to be. The problem centres around the word “with” as it is used in the first statement, which seems to indicate a relation to intention-with-which, but this misses the fact that there is a difference between doing an action with an intention in the sense of “I have another intention while I am separately and intentionally performing my current action” and doing an action with an intention is the sense that “I am performing my current action with the intention of performing another.” The first type does not imply a connection between the two actions, the latter does. Assume a case where the flamingo cannot be fed until the floor is clean. In that case, it would be perfectly correct to say that, “in

mopping the floor, Veronica intended to feed her flamingos afterwards,” precisely because here the two actions are linked, and the intention to feed the flamingos is the intention with which Veronica mops the floor. Let us call this case (8’’). Assuming, as Wilson and Shpall do, that no such necessary connection as in (8’’) exists between Veronica’s actions, we are left with not one new use of intention, but a statement that expresses two different applications of the concept intention, each application relating to a given intention. The mopping of the floor is a case of intentional action: “I am (intentionally) doing X,” and the feeding of the flamingo is a case of intention-for- the-future: “I intend to do X.” In the case of (8’), intention-for-the-future has simply been given in a reported form: “she intends to do X.”

What this analysis shows us is twofold. First, it reinforces Anscombe’s position concerning the three – and only three – applications of the concept intention. Second, and more importantly, it raises the fact that we can, and commonly do, hold multiple intentions. Statements such as (8’) are complexes in the sense that they refer to multiple intentions. The statement as a whole is not an example of any one use of the concept of intention, but each intention in the statement is itself an example of one use of the concept. This is a concern that Anscombe herself does not address directly. It is likely that there are rules governing the relationships between multiple intentions (such as are present in (8) and (8’)) that we ought to try to explicate. This question is best addressed not under the criterion of the unity of the three uses, but as part of a consideration of the relationship between intention and practical reason. I will not be investigating this question here, and at this point, it is enough merely to note the existence of these complexes, as this supports the view that there are only three applications of the concept intention.