Are You Doing What You Intend, or Just Meaning To?
A Plan Forms Before the First Nail Is Hammered
Imagine you decide this morning to build a treehouse next weekend. You tell a friend, “I intend to hammer the first board Saturday at sunrise.” But right now, the wood is still stacked in the garage, unmeasured and uncut. Have you actually begun building, just by forming the plan? Or is your intention something locked away in your head until your body moves?
Philosophers wrestle with this exact puzzle because intention is slippery. The word covers at least three things: prospective intention (what you mean to do later), intentional action (what you are doing right now on purpose), and intention-with-which (the bigger reason behind your present move). You might be sawing a plank with the intention of erecting a wall—which is part of the larger plan to build a shelter. The central question is, can we explain all three with one idea, or are they separate? The way we answer changes how we think about planning, doing, and who we really are.
The Surprising Suggestion: Intending Is Already Doing
Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001) pushed back against the idea that intentions are hidden mental events. She noticed that when you say “I am crossing the road,” you don’t guarantee you’ll get to the other side. You might be hit by a car the next instant. Yet it would be odd to say you weren’t crossing the road at all. The present progressive—“I am doing A”—has a built-in openness. So Anscombe proposed something radical: to intend to do something is not to house a private picture in your mind; it is to be already in progress, to be embarked on an intentional act, even if just barely.
Michael Thompson (21st century) developed this line further. He argues that intending is a form of imperfectivity—a thing underway toward completion, even when no visible steps have been taken. If you intend to visit the zoo next Thursday, you are, in a real sense, on the way to doing so, the way dough is already rising even though the cake does not yet exist. This view explains something that other accounts stumble over: why the object of an intention is always an action, not a static fact. You don’t “intend that a state of affairs holds”; you “intend to climb the tree.” And it elegantly ties together “I am doing A because I am doing B” with “I am doing A because I intend B,” since both describe the same forward movement of an action in progress.
But critics spot cracks. Is my plan to blink at 3 p.m. tomorrow really a thing I am already doing right now? What about a navigational mistake: if I intend to walk home by the shortest route but take a wrong turn, am I still engaged in that intended action, or has my “progress” vanished? The theory insists such cases merely show how liminal being in progress can be, but many find that hard to swallow.
Davidson Moves Inside: Intention as a State of Mind
Donald Davidson (1917–2003) initially thought “intention with which” could be reduced to a pattern of reasons: you do something intentionally because you have a pro-attitude (a desire, a valuing) toward some outcome, plus a belief that what you are doing will bring it about. But he soon realized future-directed intention didn’t fit. You can lie in bed intending to review a book, with the volume untouched across the room, and no action links your state to the world. That, Davidson admitted, is pure intending—a genuine mental state, not reducible to current doing.
This forced a new path. Most philosophers now accept that prospective intention is a mental state, and try to explain intentional action in terms of it. The simplest version says doing A intentionally is executing a prior intention to do A. But immediate trouble surfaces. I can wave my arm intentionally without planning it ahead of time. So John Searle (1932–) refined the picture: we have both prior intention and intention in action, the latter being the intention you have while performing the act. Still, I can count as doing A intentionally even when A itself was never my aim—just a foreseen side-effect. I keep pumping water into a house knowing it is poisoned, and I poison the inhabitants intentionally, though I never intended the harm. So the link between the mental state and the act is more complex than a simple matching.
A deeper worry is whether explaining intentional action by appealing to intention as a mental state secretly circles back on itself. If my intention’s content is always “I intend to do A intentionally,” then the explanation uses the very idea it aims to clarify. Defenders counter that we can intend to skip breakfast without intending to do so intentionally—forgetfulness might fulfill the plan. The technical debate turns on whether execution—the link between a mental state and movement—is a causal relation at all, or something more like a formal principle that structures the action into a recognizable deed.
Bratman’s Big Insight: Intentions Are Small Commitments
Michael Bratman (20th–21st century) took a different angle. Intentions, he argued, are not just desires or beliefs; they are the building blocks of plans. When you intend to bake a cake, you commit yourself in a way mere wanting doesn’t. A fleeting desire for dessert doesn’t have the same conduct-controlling force. Intentions resist reconsideration—you don’t re-weigh every grocery aisle decision—and they feed into further means-end reasoning: if I intend the cake, I must also intend to buy eggs.
Bratman identifies three huge practical advantages. First, intentions let you decide now for situations where you won’t have time to think later (like a fire-drill plan). Second, they let you carry out long, multi-step projects that need your future self to cooperate with your present self. Third, they make coordination with other people possible—your friend can buy flour because she knows your intention to bake. To secure these benefits, Bratman contends, our intentions need to be consistent with each other and with our beliefs, and to follow means-end coherence. If you intend the cake and believe whisking is necessary, rational pressure pushes you to intend to whisk.
The picture runs into a dilemma about why those rules of rationality exist. If they are just useful habits, then sometimes it might be smart to ignore them, which would mean intentions aren’t really binding after all. If, instead, they are strict demands of reason, it is puzzling how just having formed an intention can generate an obligation. Critics also worry that Brathman’s notion of intending as a plan leans too much on future coordination and not enough on what happens now in an intentional act. If intentions are basically planning tools, why must one be present in every intentional deed, like spontaneously laughing at a joke?
The Belief Puzzle: When Intending Is Knowing
Another strand of thought, prominent in Anscombe and Stuart Hampshire (1914–2004), ties intention tightly to belief and knowledge. When you are doing something intentionally, you know you are doing it—not by observing yourself like a security camera, but in a direct, non-observational way. Anscombe called this practical knowledge. If you intend to go home, you seem to believe you will go home, and this belief isn’t formed by collecting evidence like a scientist. You just know it in the act of deciding.
If intention involves belief, what is the rest? One view is that an intention is a belief that you will do something, caused by a desire. But that makes the belief feel like a passenger—the desire does the driving. David Velleman (20th–21st century) proposed a bolder idea: intentions are beliefs that fulfill themselves, motivated by a drive to know what you are doing. You act to make the belief true. Yet a natural objection surfaces: if we have a general urge to make our beliefs true, why aren’t you equally motivated to trip over a rug when you believe you are going to trip? That seems absurd.
The deepest challenge is epistemic. Forming an intention seems to let you come to a belief about what you will do without the ordinary sort of evidence. Paul Grice (1913–1988) called this “licensed wishful thinking.” We normally criticize people who believe things just because they want them to happen. Why should the mind be allowed to bypass that rule in the case of action? Some reply that when you know how to do something—when the execution of the intention can be credited to your own know-how—the belief is legitimately formed. Others insist the belief is merely about what is in progress, which verifies itself because being in progress doesn’t require completion. The disagreement remains one of the liveliest in the philosophy of mind.
So What Is an Intention, Really? And Why Should You Care?
The theories in this debate aren’t just dusty museum pieces. At stake is how you understand your own power to commit. When you promise a friend to show up, or decide to learn an instrument, are you creating a psychological push, or are you simply starting to walk a path you now see yourself on? If Brathman is right, then being a person involves knitting small intentions into large stretches of a life you can partly see ahead. If the “intending as doing” camp is right, then your smallest plan is already more connected to the physical world than you realize, and your self-knowledge about the future is not prediction but an artifact of the shape your activity already takes.
The disagreement also sharpens a question about weakness. You can judge it best to quit a bad habit and yet not intend to stop. Davidson tried to explain that by calling intention an “unconditional judgment” that a thing is desirable. But when evidence suggests you can faultlessly fail to intend what you judge best, we bump into the unsettling boundary where reason feels powerless. Your own experience of tough choices—between studying and scrolling, between keeping a resolution and breaking it—confronts you with the very structure philosophers are mapping. Understanding what an intention is doesn’t settle what you should intend, but it offers a clearer mirror of the machinery behind each ordinary, purposeful act.
Think about it
- If a clever neuroscientist could scan your brain and list all your plans before you were aware of them, would that prove those plans were already being carried out, or just that they existed as silent thoughts?
- You decide to meet a friend at noon, but you get stuck in traffic and never arrive. Did the meeting ever genuinely begin? What does your answer say about the intentions you set for your own life?
- Imagine you want to learn a hard song on guitar only because your teacher insists. You practice slowly, without ever feeling like you intend the whole piece. According to the thinkers in this article, could you still be described as intentionally learning it? Why or why not?
