The paper is an introductory essay to the Polish translation of M.E. Bratman’s paper The Fecundity of Planning Agency. Instead of summarizing the main drifts of Bratman’s work, the author tries to show a few important parallels between his approach to action theory and the so-called praxiology (or ‘theory of efficient action’) proposed by Tadeusz Kotarbinski. It occurs that there are important similarities between their approaches both to specific problems in action theory (as: concept of an agent, the role of (...) Buridan’s Ass, or mind-infusion of actions) and to the general question how to understood agency (norms of planning). A brief presentation of these similarities gives two central results. Firstly, it allows to interpret Bratman as a kind of praxiologist, and, secondly, it shows that praxiological thinking proposed by Kotarbinski is still a vital perspective in contemporary action theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the view that a person performs an action A intentionally only if she intends to A against Michael Bratman’s alleged counterexample to it: the videogame case. I object that Bratman is mistaken in assuming that the consistency among an agent’s intentions is about the consistency among intended goals or objectives. Instead, I argue that the real reason why an agent’s intentions need to be consistent with each other is due to the necessity of the compatibility (...) of corresponding efforts of trying. But unfortunately for Bratman, this efforts-based consistency constraint – as a replacement of the objectives-based consistency constraint – cannot save the videogame case. (shrink)

Presents an analogue of the Preface Paradox for intention, and discusses possible implications for the philosophy of action.