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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Varieties of Normativity: an Essay On Social Ontology VI. The Normativity of Intentions The structure of intending is rather complicated, and it is the subject of a very extensive debate. Virtually all participants to this debate, however, agree that intending is subject to more stringent rational considerations than are other intentional states.

We could have contradictory desires without thereby being irrational, but for one who has contradictory intentions, i.e., one who intends to have a meal and not to have a meal simultaneously, a charge of irrationality will almost always succeed. Intentions are connected to actions in ways in which mere desires are not.

You can only intend to do things that you believe are up to you, and when you intend to do X, then if your intention is to be fulfilled X must come about “in the right way”, i.e., in the way the intending agent foresees that X should come about. These two features of intentions not only distinguish them from related phenomena like desires or wishes, but also explain why intending to do X commits us in certain ways.

If you form an intention today to visit friends tomorrow, forming that intention somehow settles your deliberative process; you are now committed to visit your friends tomorrow. This does not mean that you cannot possibly change your mind: the commitments that arise from intentions are defeasible, just like those that arise from promising. But there is nonetheless a stark contrast between the way commitments arise from intentions and the way they arise out of speech acts.

Forming intentions is itself optional, but once they are formed, the commitments which follow from them do not arise in virtue of constitutive rules imposed, as it were, from without; rather, they arise solely in virtue of the intrinsic nature of the intentions themselves. Imagine that you communicate to your students your intention to tidy up your office.

Month after month, indeed semester after semester, students visit you and see that you have done nothing of the sort: your office is ever messier. Regularly they ask: “What about your intention to tidy up your office?”, to which you reply: “It is still there”. Nothing has prevented you from carrying out your intention; you simply have not done so.