Intentions and Intending

In this chapter we continue the study of intentions began in Chapter 2, §5. Recall that an intention is in this book what a person intends, not a state of intending. We tackle the question raised there whether intentions are actions or propositions. We argue that they are neither. Obviously, they are not prescriptions or mandates. Intentions and prescriptions exhaust the category of practitions. We show that intentions have a two-valued logical structure in a way exactly parallel to that of prescriptions, studied in Chapter 4. We need again Meta-theorem I of Chapter 3, § 14. Similarly we have the problem of elucidating the designated value of intentions involved in implication. Maintaining the principle of the unity of reason, since prescriptions and intentions are complementary basic units of content of practical thinking, we adopt the view that that value is very much the same as the Legitimacy of prescriptions. Thus, we built on Chapter 5 an account of the Legitimacy values of intentions. The causal role of intending is discussed in Chapter 10.