We are purposeful creatures. That would seem to be beyond serious doubt. Aside from the occasional twitch, sneeze, hiccup, yawn, or blush—and a wide range of autonomic processes—our behaviour is not merely efficacious but directed. It consists of actions.
But what makes an action intentional? A common assumption is that intention consists in some prior inner event: a thought, a decision, or a particular configuration of neural activity that initiates what follows. We have reason to resist that assumption.
Consider a familiar case. When you rose from your bed this morning, you did so intentionally. But it would be a mistake to suppose that your intention consisted in a discrete episode in your brain—a nascent act that then caused your body to move. Certainly there was neural activity, but there is no need to treat it as an inner “intender” issuing commands. There is no agent within the brain pulling the strings.
Instead, intention is better understood as a feature of the organism as it is situated in its world—as a way it is poised to engage with its circumstances. It concerns how you are constituted: your situated dispositions to respond to particular situations, prompts, and possibilities in certain ways. When you get out of bed, you act as the kind of creature you are, in the situation you are in: one whose habits, sensitivities, and history incline it toward that behaviour. This is what we register when we say that someone “acts in character.”
Put this way, intentional action can begin to look merely habitual. But habits need not be blind. What matters is not whether an action is preceded by explicit thought, but whether it belongs to an organised field of responsiveness—one that is sensitive to circumstances, open to adjustment, and able, in the right conditions, to be made explicit.
Here a further feature becomes important: our readiness to communicate what we are doing. If I were to interrupt you and ask what you are doing, you would almost certainly have something to say. You are not covertly narrating your life in advance; rather, you are disposed to communicate your activity when prompted, within practices where such communication has a place.
This readiness is not merely evidence of intention, though it is that. It is also part of what it is to act intentionally. To act intentionally is, in part, to be the sort of creature whose engagements with the world belong to organised patterns of responsiveness—patterns that sustain, and sometimes give rise to, communication, though not always.
This cannot depend on actual performance. One might be gagged, interrupted, or otherwise unable to respond, and yet still act intentionally. What matters is not the act of communication itself, but the underlying preparedness: a structured sensitivity to situations and to others that would ordinarily enable it.
Seen in this light, more explicit forms of deliberation—imagining outcomes, weighing reasons, anticipating consequences—are not more intentional than ordinary, habitual actions. They are more elaborate expressions of the same underlying capacities. Some actions involve explicit communication; others unfold through gesture, movement, or skilled response. All belong to a continuum shaped by the ways in which an organism is situated and able to respond.
This perspective also raises a further question. What of animals? When a dog chases a squirrel, is it acting intentionally? It would be too strong to deny this. Dogs exhibit patterns of behaviour that we readily take to be directed toward outcomes, and they respond to their surroundings in flexible and intelligible ways. Their behaviour expresses urgency, pursuit, and excitement in forms we recognise.
Part of what is at work here is that we find it easier to attribute intention where there are signs of responsiveness that resemble communication, broadly understood. We are more confident in attributing intention to a dog than to simpler organisms, not because the behaviour is more complex in a purely causal sense, but because it is more evidently embedded in patterns of signalling, coordination, and response.
Wittgenstein draws attention to a related shift in perspective: “We say: ‘The cock calls the hens by crowing’ … Isn’t the aspect quite altered if we imagine the crowing to set the hens in motion by some kind of physical causation?” What changes here is not the observable behaviour, but how we are prepared to situate it. In one case, it belongs to a pattern of interaction; in the other, it is reduced to a mechanism. The difference lies not in the presence of some hidden ingredient, but in whether the behaviour is taken as part of a responsive exchange.
A similar sensitivity can be seen within our own species. Doubts about intention are sometimes expressed—or allowances made—in cases where communicative responsiveness is diminished or unfamiliar: in descriptions of so-called feral humans, or in early encounters between cultures whose forms of expression were not yet mutually intelligible. In such cases, it is not simply behaviour that is in question, but whether it can be situated within a shared field of response and recognition. Where that field is thin or disrupted, our confidence in attributing intention can falter.
What differs across these cases is not the presence or absence of intention as an inner state, but the richness and accessibility of the situations in which behaviour can be understood. Human beings possess highly developed practices for making activity explicit—for describing, explaining, and evaluating what they are doing. This does not create intention, but it deepens and refines it, situating action within more complex networks of possibility and response.
If this is right, then we should be cautious about locating intention in inner mechanisms, whether neural or otherwise. Communication, in its various forms, is not the output of a hidden agent, but an expression of organised engagement with the world. Agency is not something contained within us as a part; it is a feature of us as situated organisms.
There has, in other words, to be a cutoff. Intention does not extend indefinitely inward to organs, cells, or atoms. But neither is it located in some inner component. It belongs at the level of the organism as it is situated in its world—the level at which a living being can act, respond, and, in its various ways, make sense of what it is doing.
