Elizabeth Anscombe, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Intentional action is action to which a certain sense of the question "Why?" applies — where the answer specifies the agent's reason, not a cause.1 The agent's knowledge of his own intentional action is non-observational: he does not infer what he is doing from observing himself, nor from any inner inspection of an "intention" as antecedent cause.
Practical knowledge, after Aquinas, is "the cause of what it understands" (Intention §48): it is not a contemplative knowing of pre-existing facts but is constitutive of the action it knows.2 The same physical event can be intentional under one description and not under another — the doctrine of "under a description" — so that intention is not a separate inner act but a structural feature of how an action is known and described.
The standard Cartesian-Humean picture, according to which intentional action is bodily movement caused by a prior mental state, is exactly the picture Intention was written to dismantle.345
The answers to the question ' Why? which give it an application are, then, more extensive in range than the answers which give reasons for acting. This question 'Why? can now be defined as the question expecting an answer in this range. And with this we have roughly outlined the area of intentional actions. 19. We do not add anything attaching to the action at the time it is done by describing it as intentional.Intention, pp. 40–41
CONTENTS | __ Page The subject introduced under three heads: expression of intention for the future, intentional action, and intention in acting. 1 Intuitive understanding of the difference between Usefulness of considering the verbal expression of intention for the future in order to avoid various dead ends. Uselessness of an introspective explanation of intention.Intention, pp. 3–4
"I believed..."' does not imply "I thought of..." or "I had the idea before my mind..."', even when "'I believed..."' and "'I had the sensation... " are equivalent. But if one looks for the sensation in question, what one finds is particular sensations which maybe one did not know one had, but which, under the influence of a preconceived picture of how these things must be, one now takes as the 'data'.VOLUME TWO, p. 75
It makes the assumption that the explanation of the coming about of actions by volition and intention is what thinkers of modern times call 'causal' explanation and that this is just one single sort of explanation. And similarly for reference to what someonebelieves, whenthis comesintoexplanation of his action.Human Life, Action and Ethics, pp. 88–89
No. This is what he was doing — dialling a number.Of course he wantedit tomove!But saying so does not add a new event to the record. The teleology of conscious action is not to be explained as efficient causality by a condition, or state, of desire. Remembering that that was 'what I did... for,' does not have to involve remembering such a state.Human Life, Action and Ethics, pp. 89–90
Intention founded the contemporary philosophy of action. Davidson's "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" (1963) is a direct response that re-Cartesianizes intention as inner cause — the central rival in the field. Bratman's planning theory and Velleman's belief-as-self-knowledge approach develop in Davidson's wake. Setiya's Reasons Without Rationalism and Practical Knowledge return to the Anscombian framework sympathetically. Moran's Authority and Estrangement on first-person authority is closer to her position than to Davidson's. The debate between the Anscombian and Davidsonian camps continues to define the field.