What Are Intentions? 1. Immediate Intention and Action Initiation Pre-sma Stimulation Can Evoke a State Resembling Immediate Intention a Model of Frontal Contributions to Intentional Action ---insert Figure 1 about Here --- 2. Prospective Intentions

Draft, do not quote without permission. Fellowship and a project grant from ESRC. 2 Introduction Neuroscientific work on intentions and voluntary actions has tended to focus on very short time scales, immediately before movement onset. As a prime example, the intentions investigated by Benjamin Libet are states that are first consciously experienced on average 200ms before action onset. Libet's experiments showed that these conscious intentions were reliably preceded by a few hundred milliseconds by a negative brain potential, the so-called 'readiness potential'. The existence of this antecedent unconscious brain activity indicated that the action was initiated unconsciously rather than by the conscious intention. This led Libet to the conclusion that we do not have full-blown " free will ". However, he attempted to salvage a limited form of free will by suggesting that although we cannot consciously initiate actions, we can still consciously veto them in the 200ms interval between conscious intention and action onset. Libet's conception of free will and his interpretation of his results have been widely discussed and criticized. Here, we take as our starting point one of these lines of criticism, voiced notably by Shaun Gallagher (2006). Gallagher argues that it is misguided to attempt to frame the question of free will at the time scale and in terms of the very short term motor intentions and control processes Libet considers. Rather, free will involves temporally extended deliberative processes and applies to intentional actions considered at levels of description typically higher and more abstract than descriptions in terms of motor processes and bodily movements. In earlier work, one of us (Pacherie, 2008) proposed a three-tiered hierarchical model of intentions, the DPM model, distinguishing distal or prospective intentions, proximal or immediate intentions, and motor intentions; the other (Haggard, 2008) offered a naturalized model of human volition involving a set of decision-making processes concerned with whether to act, what to do (and how) and when to act. If Gallagher is right about the temporal and intentional framework relevant for the exercise of free will, a discussion of free will must at least include not only the contribution of intentions to the final process of action initiation itself, but also the anterior decision processes that take place at the level of prospective intentions. Providing a satisfactory definition of intention is notoriously difficult. In this chapter, we assume that intention is a mental state, which may be associated with particular …