Indivisible Atoms of Intention

We are purposeful creatures. That would seem to be a fact beyond all doubt. Aside from the odd twitch, sneeze, hiccup, yawn, blush and a whole variety of other much more common autonomic processes, our purposeful — as distinct from merely efficacious — behaviours are invariably of the intentional sort. They are actions.

We are intentionally directed creatures not because we think of every action in anticipation but because we are prepared to communicate our goals when appropriately prompted. But how can a preparedness, readiness or disposition to communicate a goal be sufficient to justify purposeful behaviour? This post is intended to offer an explanation.

When you arose from your bed this morning no doubt you did it intentionally. My aim is to show that the intention to do so, was not initiated by a special pattern of neural activity but by a special constitution of you as an organism — including your brain of course. Certainly there was activity in your brain prior to your getting up, but it would be mistaken to suppose that this activity constituted a nascent intention. There is no intender in your brain pulling any strings to lift you from your slumber or to remove you from your bed.

Intention is not an activity of brain cells so much as a state of you as an organism in which certain causal influences lead to certain patterns of behaviour. In other words, when you get up, you simply act out of habit. This is not to say that habits are unintentional. What I am suggesting is that many—perhaps all—of our actions are a consequence of the way we are configured; of our dispositions to respond to certain causal influences in certain ways. This is surely what we mean when we say that someone “acts in character.” What we need to examine in order to understand intention is these dispositions to act — in particular our dispositions to represent.

If at any point in time I were to interrupt you and ask what you are doing, I’m pretty sure that you would have an answer at the ready. It would certainly be disconcerting for us both if you didn’t. Now it cannot be true that you are covertly narrating your life as you live it just in case someone asks you to explain yourself. You are simply adept—as we all are—in the skill of offering representations of your causal engagements on demand. So I am saying that this preparedness to produce representations is is necessary to explain intentional behaviour because the preparedness in itself is causally influential upon behaviour.

Certainly there are times when we are thrown into unfamiliar circumstances where we need to consider the possible consequences of our actions. But it is important to bear in mind that there is nothing about these forms of activity that makes them any more intentional than our more ordinary acts of habit. Some of our actions are the result of explicitly contemplating reasons or anticipating future states of affairs. Others are the product of images, objects, gestures and enactments that we are capable of producing, performing or describing.

Representations are intentional artefacts and behaviours. It is for this reason that we need to distinguish  sharply between the objects and behaviours that representations are from the indivisibly intentional creatures — the individuals — that produce them. The only way a creature can contain an intentional artefact or behaviour is by an intentional act. There are no intentional agents or behaviours within us. If we assume that the agency capable of producing representations exists within us — as opposed to being a state of us — then we undermine the whole project of examining and explaining what it is to have agency in the first place — to be an intentionally directed creature and to have a mind.

There has to be a cutoff. Intention doesn't reach all the way back. I am arguing that the cutoff is at the level of the organism, not its organs, its cells or its atoms.