Conscious Intentions: Do We Need a Creation Myth?

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We experience ourselves as agents, performing goal-directed actions in the world. In her paper about Conscious Intentions: The social creation myth Pacherie develops a creation myth about the function of conscious intentions, based on her hierarchical concept of individual motor actions and joint action. In this creation myth, conscious intentions are not understood as internal mental states with a teleofunctional role. Having a conscious intention exerts a specific contribution to motor control and conscious intentions might have a potential causal power in this myth. In this commentary I want to postulate, that Pacherie ’s social creation myth is more than a myth but rather the search for an explanation of the function of conscious intentions in the physical world. It tries to explain the feature of the intention being conscious that endows it with its particular causal function. Yet — speaking about a causal function — the potential analytical and neuroscientific limitations of a causal function of conscious intentions in the social creation myth have to be analysed with regard to the argument of causal closure and results of experimental approaches to the causal relevance of conscious intentions. I argue that despite these limitations the social creation myth could be an important step on the way of finding an explanation about the function of conscious intentions, if the question about the function of conscious intentions is slightly adjusted and is not understood in a strictly causal way.