What happens to our conception of mind and rational agency when we take seriously future-directed intentions and plans and their roles as inputs into further practical reasoning? The author's initial efforts in responding to this question resulted in a series of papers that he wrote during the early 1980s. In this book, Bratman develops further some of the main themes of these essays and also explores a variety of related ideas and issues. He develops a planning theory of intention. Intentions (...) are treated as elements of partial plans of action. These plans play basic roles in practical reasoning, roles that support the organization of our activities over time and socially. Bratman explores the impact of this approach on a wide range of issues, including the relation between intention and intentional action, and the distinction between intended and expected effects of what one intends. (shrink)

Ordinary usage supports both a relatively strong belief requirement on intention and a tight conceptual connection between intention and intentional action. More specifically, it speaks in favor both of the view that "S intends to A" entails "S believes that he (probably) will A" and of the thesis that "S intentionally A-ed" entails "S intended to A." So, at least, proponents of these ideas often claim or assume, and with appreciable justification. The conjunction of these two ideas, however, has some (...) highly counterintuitive implications. This suggests that a certain skepticism about the coherence of ordinary usage of "intention" may be salutary. Fortunately, the skeptic need not abandon the quest for understanding. Much can be gleaned from a careful investigation of the functions attributed to intention in the literature. In this paper, I argue that the capacity of intention to do the work that the literature assigns it does not depend upon intentional A-ing's entailing intending to A, nor upon there being a strong belief constraint on intention, nor even a certain relatively weak belief constraint. I also develop an account of the features of intention in virtue of which it is capable of doing this work. This account provides the core of an adequate conception of intention. Toward the end of the paper, I briefly motivate acceptance of a modest belief requirement on non-functional grounds. (shrink)