Most attribution theories focus on inductive inferences and abstract causal categories. By contrast, goal-based and knowledge structure theories focus on people's perceptions of intentional actions, their deductive inferences, and their concrete explanations of actions. Goal-based theories have demonstrated the importance of goals and intentions as explanations. However, research shows that explanations of goal-based actions reflect the extremity and controllability of the actions, the presence of obstructions, and the type of causal question eliciting the explanation. These factors determine whether people prefer to invoke goals or enabling conditions (or conjunctions) as explanations. Judgments of explanations also reflect communicative principles or informativeness and relevance, more than logical judgments of probability and necessity. The goal-based approach is often seen as an alternative to the inductive covariational approach, but the two lines of research can be integrated.