In everyday language, intention means to have a conscious aim, purpose or design to one’s actions. There is clearly a good deal of philosophical (and indeed legal) debate over the term intention and its relationship to concepts such as free will. Philosophers have identified acting with intention as including the action; desires and beliefs appropriate to that action; and a relation between the action and the belief that in some sense is explanatory. Walking to Fisher and Donaldson’s to buy a pastry is an example of this: there is action (walking), there is belief (that Fisher and Donaldson’s sells pastries) and the belief explains the action. The concept of INTENTIONALITY is also important in a philosophical sense, over and above its everyday use. Intentionality is used to describe properties of certain mental states in which reference is made to something else.
It is identifiable by a quality of ‘aboutness’. The mental states of hope or desire for example have a quality of aboutness—one hopes for things, one desires things.
In biological psychology the term intention is fraught with difficulty when applied to the behaviour of animals. There is transparently a sense in which the behaviour of animals has intention, in so far as it has purpose: animals emit actions which will produce predictable outcomes. It is also clear that appropriate actions can be produced in a given situation, indicating that a selection process has occurred. But whether one can infer from purpose and selection that an animal has a mental state in which intention is represented is very far from clear. In some ways the debate about this can be characterized as one between cognitive types of explanation, in which mental states are used to explain behaviour (see COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, and behaviourist explanations (see BEHAVIOURISM) in which the mechanisms of learning are thought sufficient to explain the actions, without recourse to (unknowable and hypothetical) mental states in animals (or, indeed, for strict behaviourists, humans). Others have adopted what has become known as an INTENTIONAL STANCE in which mentalistic explanations are used but, as it were, without prejudice: they are used in effect as shorthand because they provide explanations that are manageable, when other types of explanation would not be. This hardly seems satisfactory, but as long as the mental states of animals remain unclear to human observers, questions about intention in animals are not likely to be resolved.
