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What I Will Do and What I Intend To Do

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Richard K. Scheer
Richard K. Scheer
Affiliation:
Lincoln, Nebraska
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Extract

If one thinks of intentions as entities of some sort, states or dispositions, for example, it should eventually strike him that there are peculiar difficulties with the idea. For example, he will have trouble counting his intentions. In a particular situation, we ask someone, ‘What are you going to do about that? And this?’ And his answer might be, ‘My intention is to pay that, and, as for this, my intention is to ignore it.’ But of course he may have said, ‘My intention is to pay this and ignore that.’ For this reason and, as we will see, others, there is no such thing as a complete list of intentions that a person has. If someone told us, ‘I have just eight intentions at present’, we would think he was joking, even though he intends to do eight things—grade papers, meet a class at nine, and so on. And if we ask; ‘What are you going to do today?’, he may answer that he has a class at nine, office hours at two, and lunch already scheduled. But even though he has more to do today than yesterday, he would hardly tell us, ‘I am afraid I have more intentions today than I did yesterday.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 71 , Issue 278 , October 1996 , pp. 531 - 539
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1996

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References

1 I have reviewed these in my ‘The Causal Theory of Intentions’ in Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 17, No. 2 (04 1994), p. 417.

2 Wittgenstein, L., Zettel, ed. By Anscombe, G. E. M. and Von Wright, G. H., trans by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967)par. 46.Google Scholar

3 I am not interested in another distinction also included in this ambiguous phrase—the distinction between what a person intends to do and what he does accidentally or inadvertently. The negative statements of intention are interesting but I can not explore them here. ‘I do not intend to humour him’, ‘I intend to not humour him’, ‘Humouring him is not something I intend to do’, and the like, will not be distinguished here. They are interesting because their grammatical structures do not always reveal their meaning. E.g., ‘I have no intention of humouring him’ often means ‘I will not!

4 Austin, J. L., ‘Three Ways of Spilling Ink’ in Philosophical Papers, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1970) p. 278.Google Scholar

5 In ‘The Conceivability of Mechanism’, Norman Malcolm said, ‘… a majority of actions do not embody intentions formed in advance’. The article was in The Philosophical Review, Jan. 1968, p. 62. I do not fully agree with Malcolm's reasons for saying this. But this remark prompted me and many others to think about the matter.