Intending is Believing: A Defense of Strong Cognitivism

We argue that intentions are beliefs—beliefs that are held in light of, and made rational by, practical reasoning. To intend to do something is neither more nor less than to believe, on the basis of one’s practical reasoning, that one will do it. The identification of the mental state of intention with the mental state of belief is what we call strong cognitivism about intentions. It is a strong form of cognitivism because we identify intentions with beliefs, rather than maintaining that beliefs are entailed by intentions or are components of them. To illustrate the basic idea, consider the attitude that you might express with the words, “I am going to fail this exam” (Anscombe 1957/2000, 2). We propose that this attitude is a practical conclusion if it is grounded in practical reasoning—if you hold it because you see failing the exam as somehow worthwhile. (Perhaps it will impress your love interest.) It is a theoretical conclusion if it is held in light of evidence. (Perhaps you think that you have not studied enough to do well.) We hold that both conclusions constitute beliefs and exhibit the functional roles of belief. The former is an intention or, as we shall sometimes say, a “practical” belief, the latter an evidence-based, “theoretical” belief. The aim of strong cognitivism is to explain the relation between practical and theoretical reasoning—that is, to explain how reasoning about what to do relates to reasoning about what will happen in the future. This relation is difficult to understand if practical and theoretical reasoning are seen as answering different sorts of questions—if, say, the conclusion of practical reasoning is supposed to be a judgment about what it would be good to do, or what one ought to do, or what one has most reason to do. By contrast, we hold that these two forms of reasoning are related because practical reasoning is concerned with a factual question—the question of what one is going to do. This is why we say that practical reasoning and theoretical reasoning both issue in beliefs. What distinguishes the conclusions of practical and theoretical reasoning is not what they are about but how they are grounded—that is, the form of reasoning in light of which the respective conclusions are held. In what follows, we first describe what we take to be the essential features of practical reasoning and explain how practical reasoning can ground belief (§1). We then offer a series of arguments for strong cognitivism (§2) and address a number of objections to it (§3). We conclude with some general remarks about why strong cognitivism of the kind we defend is philosophically important.