Intention and Motivation : Reduction or Constitutive Part

On a reductivist conception of intentions, an intention to do an action or a plan A is reducible to a predominant desire to A, to the belief that one will A or to the judgment that A is the best thing to do or even to some combination of these states. Against these views, non-reductivist about intentions have argued that decisions and intentions move us a step beyond the simple possession of desires, beliefs and judgments because I can have any combination of these states withoug having the intention to A. Even if I am predominantly motivated to do something, I may still not have formed an intention. « I might still be disposed to deliberate about what to do; for I might still not see the issue as settled. » (Bratman 1987 : 19). Hence, having an intention is something different and irreducible to a combination of desires and beliefs. Moreover, it has been argued that « my intention involves a special commitement to action that ordinary desires do not » since intentions are « conduct-controlling pro-attitudes » whereas ordinary desires are « merely potential influencers of action » (Bratman 1987 : 16). Finally, the realization of our desires supposes that we have capacities to control our actions. This requires at the lowest level that we have motor representations that produce and control our most basic actions (Searle 1983, Mele 1992, Pacherie 2003). In the same vein but at a higher level, the intention to realize a plan seems to play a similar role in the initiation, the control and the coordination of the actions that are parts of this plan. Thus, most philosophers agree now that intentions are irreducible mental states. One distinguishes though two categories of intentions depending on the type of representationnal content and conscious control. On one hand, prior intentions and present intentions are fully conscious ; they are formed before acting or just before and are responsible for the conscious guidance and control of our actions at the level of plans or of action types. On the other hand, the motor intentions guide and control our mouvements or basic actions, while these control and guidance are largely unconscious. Both prior, present and motor intentions have nevertheless several functions or dimensions : before acting, they constrain and trigger our practical reasoning because it is irrational to have incompatible intentions and because our intentions need to be specified in order to be completed ; their motivational dimension is to trigger and to sustain our actions ; finally, their monitoring function is to guide our actions and to control them. In this paper, I focus on the relation between the motivational dimension of an intention and the motivations that contributed to the production of that very intention. Most philosophers will certainly agree that the motivational dimension of an intention is largely inherited from the desires and the other motivations that were reasons to form this intention. It leaves us nevertheless with the question of the ontological dependence : is the motivational dimension of an intention to A ontologically independent of our motivations to A or is it partly or even fully constituted by or relying on our motivations to A ? In the first section, I will present the various possible accounts of this relation and I will defend that the motivational dimension of an intention to A is constituted by our motivations to A. But if this first point is correct, then it raises a challenge for the non-reductivist that I will display in the second section : if intentions are partly constituted by motivating states, how the non-reductivist is going to be able to tell us that