What is intention?

Question

Recently, I asked a question "Can LLMs have intention?". But I'm sorry that the word "intention" was not clearly defined there. When I think about it, I realize I got confused, which led to many more questions, even. Considering the problem of the other minds, when we use "intention" for any human experience except our own selves, it's just an anthropological projection.

The Question

So, what is intention?

Some reflections

• Before that, we need to understand.
• Whose intention? Who is knowing it? How do they know it?
• X know the intention of Y . What could have happened?
• Is X always aware of his/her intentions?
• X observed Y 's behaviours and his actions. X concluded what could be Y looking for something – his intention.
• etc

Answer 1

An intention is an attitude — a mental posture — towards a specific goal or action. When a baseball player steps up to the plate he adopts a physical and mental posture that amounts to an intention to bat.

We generally (if not necessarily correctly) restrict intentionality to conscious agents capable of making choices. A sea anemone, for instance, can extend or refract its tentacles to feed or protect itself — it adopts different physical postures for different purposes — but those postures are 'hard-wired' reactions to different stimuli, and thus not generally presumed to be intentions. A batter at the plate, by contrast, can (ostensibly) choose whether or not to swing at a given pitch. Intention is intimately connected with the concept of choice — it is literally putting ourselves in the correct posture to act on a choice should we make it — and so it often comes up in discussions of free will.

No, we are not always consciously aware of our intentions. We can often see the beginnings of intentions in facial expressions or body language before the observed people realize their own intentions. No, we do not always know what other people's intentions are. Some people are good at masking the physical aspects of their intentions, others have complex intentions that aren't easy to suss out from the observable aspects of their attitudes. Language is the best tool we have for conveying or receiving intentions, but language is a mixed blessing.

Answer 2

Intention is a key concept in the philosophy of action, which in turn is a key concept in the concept of a person. In philosophy, only a person can perform an action, or, in philosophy, an action can only be performed by a person. Intention is a key part of this, because I can only intend to do something that I can do, or refrain from doing. (I don't normally intend to trip over my children's toys or lose my car keys.)

This profoundly affects how one might clarify whether LLMs can have intentions, and I'll have something to say about that later.

Intention is one of a number of concepts that are preliminaries of action. It looks to the future. Planning, preparing, practising, rehearsing, scouting, trying (though that typically involves failing, or being at risk of failure), (making a trial run is also a preliminary, but not the same as trying), learning a skill, exercising, are all other concepts of the same kind. However, these are perhaps most often also actions, but intending is not necessarily shown by any overt behaviour; in this, it is like deciding or evaluating or aspiring.

At first sight, one might be inclined to say that when I am carrying out an intention, I no longer intend it. But actions are complicated. When I walk (rather than drive or take the bus) to the neighbourhood shop to buy some beer, I may intend to buy beer, to spend money. I may be walking rather than taking a bus or driving to get some exercise and I may have intended that. But I am already walking and getting some exercise, so it seems inappropriate to say that I intend to do those things. I am already doing them. Yet, I am not unintentionally walking or getting some exercise. I have chosen to do that. Perhaps I should say that I am carrying out my intention to get some exercise by walking to the shop.

(That paragraph is an illustration of the complexity and subtlety of our concepts around actions.)

Intention is like introspective concepts, such as fear or happiness or pain in that I don't need evidence to know what my intentions are. What I say goes. Other people may attribute intentions to me, but get it wrong. But I cannot be wrong about what I intend (though I can, of course, mislead other people). Because of this, intending is, in some ways, like a promise or a commitment - though, of course, it does not involve any moral obligation. This is why intention is not, or not simply, a prediction. When I intend to do something, I will be actually bringing it about; predictions do not in any way suggest that.

All actions have unintended consequences, most of them trivial. When someone is affected by an action of mine, but I did not intend to affect them in that way, I can exculpate myself by pointing out that I did not intend that consequence. That's why the question of intention is often a focus of criminal law. That's why the question of intention is often a focus of criminal law.

Proving intention in a court of law is often difficult, even impossible. But there are ordinary ways in which we work out what someone is intending to do and, while they are not always correct, they are reasonably reliable. Preliminary actions, like planning or preparing are good evidence, and other clues, such as body posture, what is being attended to, and so forth are also helpful. Without going in to the whole questions of our knowledge of other minds, that's about as far as I can go.

On the question of LLMs, it should be clear now that the background that is needed to answer the question about intention is not in place. The concepts of person and of agency do not apply, and it is not meaningful to try to apply a single one - intention - without that background.

On the other hand, we do in some cases apply some of these concepts to machines. Machines are capable of saying things and even of some level of understanding of some of what people say, to some extent; they can weld things and drive vehicles. The counter-argument is that they have been built to imitate those activities as performed by human beings.

But that does mean that those descriptions do apply, though in an extended or metaphorical sense. So I would suggest that it is an over-simplification to say that they cannot perform at least some of the actions that people – human beings – carry out. It is more complicated than that.

But there is no ground for saying that they intend things.

Stanford Encyclopedia - Philosophy of action is a fairly comprehensive overview of this field. Wikipedia - Theory of action is shorter, but, for that reason, less helpful with intention specifically.

Answer 3

There are multiple theories of intention. Several people have offered you the definition provided in the sense of a general dictionary which relies on the definition of the verb to intend (MW).

a : to have in mind as a purpose or goal : plan
b : to design for a specified use or future

Another good start would be to read the SEP's article Intention, and Donald Davidson endorsed the work of G.E.M. Anscombe's Intention. There's a good article on the IEP about her. Obviously, no one theory of intention is "correct" and the others "wrong", so you'll have to decide on which parts of which theories you agree with.

Note, the author of the SEP article opens with reference to Anscombe:

Philosophical perplexity about intention begins with its appearance in three guises: intention for the future, as I intend to complete this entry by the end of the month; the intention with which someone acts, as I am typing with the further intention of writing an introductory sentence; and intentional action, as in the fact that I am typing these words intentionally. As Elizabeth Anscombe wrote in a similar context, ‘it is implausible to say that the word is equivocal as it occurs in these different cases’ and from the fact that ‘we are tempted to speak of “different senses” of a word which is clearly not equivocal, we may infer that we are pretty much in the dark about the character of the concept which it represents’ (Anscombe 1963, p. 1).

Anscombe in her work presents a tranche of important thoughts a sample of which are:

• A man can form the intention which he then does nothing to carry out, either because he is prevented or because he changes his mind; but the intention itself can be complete, although it remains a purely interior thing. (§4, pg.9)
• Intentional actions, then, are the ones to which the question 'Why?' is given application, in a special sense which is so far explained as follows: the question has not that sense if the answer is evidence or states a cause, including a mental cause... (§16, pg.24)
• [A] man's intention in acting is not so private and interior a thing that he has absolute authroity in saying what it is -- as he has absolutely authority in saying what* he dreamt. (§22., pg.36)

Important among them is reference to direction of fit. From WP:

Intention (1957) is also the classic source for the idea that there is a difference in "direction of fit" between cognitive states like beliefs and conative states like desire. (This theme was later taken up and discussed by John Searle.)[33] Cognitive states describe the world and are causally derived from the facts or objects they depict. Conative states do not describe the world, but aim to bring something about in the world.

Another good insight into intention is offered by the recently late Daniel Dennett in his Intentional Stance. In the book, Dennett offers a theory regarding to how human beings behave with regards to intentionality, which is NOT intention, but a closely related philosophical concept in the philosophy of mind. From the WP article:

Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do. (pg. 17) (emphasis mine)

Note how what is described in the passage is intention. In fact, the index contains multiple references to intention: 7, 10, 27, 59, 245, 248, 262, 278, 314. Intention is, in fact, predicated upon intentionality, so to understand the latter goes a long way to understanding the former.

And lastly, it should be noted that beginners might confuse intention with another important philosophical term: intesion. This term is related to semantics, and not about intention at all. In any case, any decent theory of intention won't be answered in the short format of Q&A on this site.

Answer 4

You should specify what you mean by 'intention', if you mean it in the sense its used in the philosophy of consciousness or, contrastively, the everyday sense

Where the term “intentionality” is concerned, we also face confusing and contentious usage. But here the problem lies partly in the fact that the relevant use is definitely not that found in common speech employing cognate terms (as when we speak of doing something intentionally). In any case, here too we must recognize basic problems of interpretation that affect substantive issues, highly pertinent to the present discussion.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-intentionality/

have (a course of action) as one's purpose or intention; plan

Answer 5

Western philosophy in general, is at a loss regarding intention; the reason is that it cannot understand the "I". The closest that it gets to this "I" is the famous "I think, therefore I am". Unfortunately, this - as a cornerstone of Western philosophy - led to (mind–body) dualism and the seperation of the spirit (pneuma) from our reality. This "ban of the spirit" from our modern worldview, resulted in the decomposition of the "I" to its functional parts: see who are you?

On the other hand, Eastern philosophy has gone in a totally reversed way: "I think, therefore I am NOT", so the goal (in order to grasp the "I") is to stop thinking. (do not take the analogy literally).

In order to understand intention, you must think of yourself as a totality living inside The totality, in such a way that there exists an interconnectedness in all possible levels. Then, this "I" that experiences life - as a participation - has thoughts caused by desire and moves by the will in the direction of specific purposes and goals, or in other words, realizes or makes actual what is otherwise merely potential.