Wanting and Intending

This book aims to answer two simple questions: what is it to want and what is it to intend? Because of the breadth of contexts in which the relevant phenomena are implicated and the wealth of views that have attempted to account for them, providing the answers is not quite so simple. Doing so requires an examination not only of the relevant philosophical theories and our everyday practices, but also of the rich empirical material that has been provided by work in social and developmental psychology.

The investigation is carried out in two parts, dedicated to wanting and intending respectively. Wanting is analysed as optative attitudinising, a basic form of subjective standard-setting at the core of compound states such as 'longings', 'desires', 'projects' and 'whims'. The analysis is developed in the context of a discussion of Moore-paradoxicality and deepened through the examination of rival theories, which include functionalist and hedonistic conceptions as well as the guise-of-the-good view and the pure entailment approach, two views popular in moral psychology.

In the second part of the study, a disjunctive genetic theory of intending is developed, according to which intentions are optative attitudes on which, in one way or another, the mark of deliberation has been conferred. It is this which explains intention's subjection to the requirements of practical rationality. Moreover, unlike wanting, intending turns out to be dependent on normative features of our life form, in particular on practices of holding responsible.

The book will be of particular interest to philosophers and psychologists working on motivation, goals, desire, intention, deliberation, decision and practical rationality.

Offers a detailed and original analysis of the concept of wanting or desire that is applicable across very different contexts, thus bridging a significant gap between discussions in the philosophy of mind, action theory, practical reasoning and ethics Proposes a novel reduction of intention which accounts for the normative phenomena that have been widely taken to speak for intention's irreducibility Supports the analyses by extensive reference to important psychological research that is largely unknown among philosophers

Contenu
Acknowledgments.- Introduction.- Part 1. Wanting.- 1. The Question of Motivational Unity: Historical Preliminaries.- 2. Motivational States.- 3. Wanting and its Symptoms.-4. Expressive Explication and the Optative Mode.- 5. Wanting, Consciousness and Affect.- Part 2. Intending.- 6. Intention, Belief and Commitment.- 7. The Intentional Syndrome: Characteristic Causal Features and Rational Requirements.- 8. Deciding.- 9. Intentions Decisional and Nondecisional.- 10. The Intention-Consequential Requirements and Anchoring Attributability.- Index.