I. Introduction:

Diego started by noting that the readings seemed to go from being quite clear to relatively obscure - Dretske (the most clear), Searle, Moya, Audi (the most obscure) - and then summarized the readings.

A. Dretske: much of our social world is the behavior that we and others exhibit, all of which is to some extent "internally motivated," but we can only call a subset of it ACTION meaning that it is INTENTIONAL or VOLUNTARY.

B. Searle: tries to provide a framework for thinking about and understanding just what we mean by INTENTIONAL. What are the features of intentional actions?
-- concludes that intentions are based on a combination of DESIRES and BELIEFS (e.g., I know that I can do it, and in the end I want nothing more than to do it). Searle notes that there is a complex network of beliefs and desires, and after weighing desires and beliefs, action results from the most desirable outcome - the outcome which inevitably surfaces to the top.

C. Moya: suggests that beliefs and desires can be dissociated from intentions, and so can not completely comprise intentions. Specifically, he says that intentions must include a "commitment or promise to act". The example of the Drug Addict which appears toward the end of Moya's article was cited frequently throughout the discussion as an illustration of this point: a drug dealer may believe that drugs are bad for him/her and desire to stop taking drugs, and although the intention NOT to take drugs is present, he/she takes drugs anyway.

D. Audi: was passed over in the summary . . .

A. Key Points in Early Discussion:

1) The discussion kicked off by clarifying Moya's perspective. There is some question as to whether the "commitment to act" was sufficient for intentions (i.e., does Moya's position necessarily work against a belief-desire framework?). Through discussion, it was clarified that Moya's main point was that intentions are not reducible to beliefs and desires.

2) One clarifying point was the philosophical insight that mental states alone are not catalysts for action (i.e., some mechanism must translate the beliefs and desires into intentions and later into actions). This is what Moya was trying to say about a commitment, and it was noted that Audi tried to solve this problem with the construct of "volition" (which, as was joked about, is poorly defined).

3) The following theme recurred throughout the discussion: do we need the commitment or volition component to describe intentions? Doesn't the strongest desire just rise up to the top of the heap and then we act accordingly?
-- various thought experiments were proposed (most notably: Bertram and the Motorcycle) but it didn't seem that any conclusions were sufficient in coming to an agreement on this issue.

B. Other Interesting Questions and Clarifications:

1) Is it possible that the required action information is coded in the beliefs and desires themselves, such that they come with their own motor programs that are activated once they "rise to the top"?

2) Do you need volitional information for both "intentions-in-action" and for "future intentions"?

3) Is "planning" different from "intention?" Perhaps planning entails a whole set of "prior intentions." Bratman notes that one important part of at least certain kinds of intentions is fitting the desires and beliefs into the context of the long-term "plans" of the actor.

4) The pragmatics of the question - "well, is that intentional?" - is critical to understanding intentional action. Considering temporal information is key: driving your car to work in the morning was provided as an example. Assuming you intentionally drive to work in the morning, "is it intentional that you open your car door? Is it intentional that you exerted exactly that much force on the handle? Is it intentional that you opened it exactly that much?" Just because an overarching goal (e.g., driving to work) is performed intentionally, each detail of achieving the goal (e.g., opening your car door) may not be intentional.

5) Is "deliberation" necessary for intentional action? Many interesting points were brought up along these lines. For instance, it was suggested that part of our criteria for imputing intentions is the presence of "counterfactual" or additional "possible worlds". Some actions are light on the counterfactual load (to do or not to do?) and so the deliberation happens quickly, whereas others have quite a few options (to do A, B, C, D, or E?), which may seem, by nature of the processing load, more deliberative. Perhaps the idea of "exerting control" as criteria for the concept of intention is related to this idea of deliberation.

6) Do we have intentions or do people just report and ascribe them? This is an important question given that where we look for criteria for identifying intention is going to be important. Is it first-person information, or is it third-person information, or is it both? Similarly, can we objectively know what another's intentions truly are at any time or do our assumptions of intentions influence our social world? When assessing social situations, is understanding intentions more important for the actor or observer?

7) Perhaps by describing what is unintentional may we define intentional action.

C. Key Closing Points:

1) The class grappled with substantive (and perhaps quantitative) interpretations of intentions which would allow us to actually put our finger on the definition and key components of intentions. Most of our discussion relied on dispositional terms which need activation.

which leads us to . . .

2) Can examining intentions via philosophical debate fully describe the phenomenon? Isn't a folk perspective at least as, if not more, critical to understand as well? Perhaps by examining the folk psychological understanding of intentions, we may better describe and characterize the beast.