Practical Thinking, Reasons for Doing, and Intentional Action: The Thinking of Doing and The Doing of Thinking

Abstract

1. Topics and approaches What believing is to theoretical, or contemplative, thinking, and to contemplative reasoning, intending is to practical thinking, and to practical reasoning. Yet what reality, or truth, is to believing is only in part what intentional action is to intending. What is believed is true or false, and to believe it is to take it to be true. What is inten dend is neither true nor false, and to intend it is not to take it as being true, but, rather, as something to He. masLe. true, it having certain worth or legitimate claim on our powers to make things happen; indeed, whenever, as it sometimes happens, one believes that one will not be able to carry out one's intention, one actually takes the very what that one intends to correspond to -not of course to bea falsehood. In any case, intending is the fundamental state of practical reason, and thoughts of intentions, which rehearse or manifest the state of intending are fundamental practical operations of (human, rational) agency. The other practical states and acts presuppose and are built up on, or are complements to, intending and rehearsals of intending. Below we discuss briefly this hierarchical structure of practical thinking and reasoning. The main topic of this essay is the logical structure of intending and the ontic nature of what is intended. For convenience, we assume that in rehearsing the state of intending to do an action A an agent