Intention at the Interface

Abstract

I identify and characterize the kind of personal-level control-structure that is most relevant for skilled action control, namely, what I call, "practical intention". I differentiate between practical intentions and general intentions not in terms of their function or timing but in terms of their content. I also highlight a distinction between practical intentions and other control mechanisms that are required to explain skilled action. I'll maintain that all intentions, general and practical, have the function specifying (and thus guiding according to those specifications), sustaining, and structuring action but that several functions that have been attributed to proximal intentions are actually implemented by other control mechanisms that are not themselves best identified as intentions. Specifically, I will claim that practical intentions do not initiate, monitor, specify or guide the fine-grained, online, kinematic aspects of action. Finally, I suggest that the way in which practical and general intentions should be differentiated is in terms of their content, where general intentions specify the overall goal, outcome, or end of an action as it is conceived of by the agent at a time, and practical intentions determine the means to that end. I conclude by providing empirical evidence to support this way of characterizing the intentions that "interface" with the mechanisms of motor control. Though this discussion has repercussions for action in general, I will limit my discussion to cases of skill.

The Establishment of College Student Employment Guidance System Integrating Artificial Intelligence and Civic Education

“…First, the similarity between student u and other students and the similarity between student u's employment units and other employment units are calculated, and the employment units of the most dissimilar top N students and the most dissimilar top N units are selected as the high confidence negative sample set. en, the negative samples are randomly sampled from the negative sample set to generate negative samples for training [28,29].…”

Skill and strategic control

“…As I've argued elsewhere, we can distinguish between general and practical intentions, where general intentions specify the general goal or end of the task and practical (instrumental) intentions fill in the means or way of achieving that goal (Fridland 2019b). When it comes to skill, the most relevant kind of intentions are the practical ones, since differences at the level of practical intention are likely to reveal differences in skill level whereas both skilled and unskilled agents could easily share general intentions.…”

Oops! I Did it Again: The Psychology of Everyday Action Slips

“…The role of motor schemas I will adopt a common model according to which actions are controlled by way of hierarchically arranged goal representations and processes (see Fridland, 2019;Mylopoulos & Pacherie, 2017Pacherie, 2008). The levels of the hierarchy are causally structured in a means-end way, such that the representations embedded within a given level specify the means of implementing the goal representations, if any, on the level(s) above them.…”

“…This is a proximal intention. Proximal intentions can be understood as representations that (a) specify an agent's goal or plan, (b) unlike distal intentions are presentdirected and tokened in the situation of action, and (c) function to help structure and guide an action's course to completion (see e.g., Fridland, 2019;Pacherie, 2008, for further discussion of the functional role of proximal intention). I will say more about how such guidance works later on, but for now, the point is merely that it is this kind of intention that is at issue when we talk of action slips as involving a failure to do what one intends to do: When I slip, I fail to do what I proximally intend to do.…”