Intentions in tension : Is there more to intentional action than just belief and desire?

Understanding intending is crucial to the understanding of purposeful human action. In the philosophy of action beliefs and desires are usually taken to be the necessary conditions of intending. The disagreement over how intentions specifically are related to beliefs and desires, is often put in terms of whether intentions are independent mental states or not. Belief-desire accounts of intending don’t feature intentions as independent mental states, whereas belief-desire-intention accounts of intending do. The goal of most accounts of intentional action is to account for three senses of intentionality: intentional action, intention-with-which and intending. Intentional action and intention-with-which are usually taken to be explicable in terms of belief and desire. Thus the focus of this thesis is on intending. This thesis aims at providing a more comprehensible picture of the kinds of arguments that have been given for and against the reducibility of intentions. It also provides an overview to reductivist belief-desire accounts and nonreductivist belief-desire-intention accounts and a tentative classification of arguments against reduction. Finally a recent Humean reductivist belief-desire account of intending is explored more thoroughly