Talk:intention

intentions plural noun : somebody's marriage plans (dated)
in·ten·tions, plural noun : somebody's plans with respect to marriage (dated) --Backinstadiums (talk) 16:01, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

no intention to do something
Don't say that someone ‘has no intention to do’ something, but '...of doing something'. What about not any intention to do something? --Backinstadiums (talk) 11:54, 27 August 2021 (UTC)

Two lead senses
The lead sense is "course of action that a person intends to follow." The second sense is "The goal or purpose behind a specific action or set of actions", exemplified by "The intention of this legislation is to boost the economy." It is here the legislation that has intention, not a person; in the primary use of the word, I expect persons to have intentions, not artifacts. These two definitions have been so for a long time, but the lead sense was removed in 2017, while its translation table stayed. I returned sense 1 back. Sense 1 is what I recognize as the primary sense of the word, intuitively. The question is whether we should have two senses or one sense.

Having two separate senses makes sense for translation purposes.

Dictionaries:
 * M-W has both senses as 1a.
 * Lexico has both senses as 1.
 * AHD has two senses for this: 1 and 2a, but they need not show one-to-one mapping but rather be some other split.
 * Collins has only one sense for this, 1.
 * Macmillan has only one sense for this, 1.

I would argue that, despite dictionaries, these are in fact two senses, though in the same semantic area: the first sense is something a person intends to do, but it is not a goal of action but an action itself, one that is not yet done but merely intended. The second sense points to instrumental subordination, namely that an action/artifact were done/made for an end. In the first sense, it does not matter for which end the action was intended, merely that it was intended, and the emphasis is on the person intending.

It is obviously debatable and dictionaries do not agree with my analysis, but we do not always follow dictionaries.

If this should be a single definition, it seems preferable to word it to explicitly cover both case: The course of action a person intends to follow or an end something is for". Or maybe "The intended course of action or the intended outcome". The single definition cannot be "The goal or purpose behind a specific action or set of actions" since it does not match "My intention was to marry a wealthy widow": there, intention is not a goal behind an action but rather the action itself, an intended one. --Dan Polansky (talk) 16:13, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

Quotations
Quotations from Wikisource:

Intentions of persons and groups of persons:
 * it has not been my intention to make general statements
 * I hope that no one will think on that account that my intention is to revive any ill feeling against France.
 * His intention was to become a resident of that state for the purpose of getting his divorce, and to that end to do all that was needful to make him such a resident, and I find he became a resident if, as a matter of law, such finding is warranted in the facts above stated.
 * Congress would have left unstated its intention to erase all state court trespass judgments
 * To be naturalized the alien must have declared his intention to become a bona fide citizen at least two years before admission,
 * the author premises that it is no part of his intention to write a treatise on the laws of rhetoric
 * And here I solemnly protest I have no intention to vilify or asperse any one
 * my intention was to publish it with his collected poems
 * such a term expresses the intention of the writer, better, perhaps, than the one he has actually chosen
 * the intention of the king of the French to abide by the treaties
 * the intention of the gods could be divined
 * The intention of the legislature, when discovered, must prevail;
 * the intention of the parties is of great importance

Intentions of written documents: Dan Polansky (talk) 18:19, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
 * it is the intention of the statute and not the intention of the party
 * It is the intention of this book to make a commencement towards a more just discrimination
 * the intention of the bill was to cause dissension and division among the colonies
 * The intention of the act was to substitute title by public registration for the cumbrous system of the old conveyancing.
 * the intention of the legislation was, as the supreme court of Illinois held, to protect the title of purchasers from the United States

Intention of the tool
To confuse things, sometimes tools have intentions, even if rarely: Google Books quotations: I would consider these uses incorrect; they are rare for sure. Dan Polansky (talk) 06:14, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
 * - intention of the tool is very rare
 * - intention behind the tool not found
 * Does the setting you plan to implement the tool in match the intention of the tool?
 * The intention of the tool is to provide the basis [...]
 * The intention of the tool is to assist program planners and their partners in developing and choosing health messages that will be the most understood, relevant, compelling, worthwhile, and to the point for promoting the desired
 * If it is the intention of the tool to eliminate alternatives to a process, that too must be vetted by the clinicians during the design process.
 * In fact, this would be a good first step to take before implementing a parser, and a good help in debugging your implementation, which is part of the underlying intention behind the tool.
 * At this stage of development, all the motive force and intention behind the tool are essentially properties of the user.

Intention of the action
Actions sometimes have intentions: In web searches, shows only 4 pages of results;  shows 6 pages,  shows 4 pages and  shows 6 pages. Why web search results are inconsistent with GNV is unclear; they would be expected to find many more uses of "purpose of the action". has only 18 pages of results. shows 52 results; shows 36 results;  shows 177 results once you click "next" multiple times.
 * - purpose beats the other items

Google Books quotations of "intention of the action": There are not many more quotes from Google Books. Some quotes from the web: Dan Polansky (talk) 06:53, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Observers may be mistaken in their inferences from acts to the intention of the action. This possibility of error leads to the possibility of deception.
 * In this task there is a contextual cue, the object that is grasped, that informs the monkey of the intention of the action to be observed.
 * The intention of the action is so to speak still present in the action itself. For that reason, we will talk about the intention of an action as characterising an action.
 * We should ask ourselves the following question: what does it mean to determine the intention of the action of someone else?
 * Does the intention of the action matter? Or just the effect?
 * Further, deontology believes that the intention of the action is as important as the action.
 * For Aquinas, it is the intention of the action that determines whether it is ethical.
 * Someone pounding nails makes noise but that's not the intention of the action;
 * It is a theory that only analyzes he intention of the action and not the consequences it will produce.
 * She has brought me up with the intention of my rejoining my countrymen

What kind of entities have intention
An answer to this can be gleaned from and from GNV.

Entities that have intentions include persons and groups of persons (Congress, legislature), but also bills, books, laws and statutes. Sometimes even tools and actions have intention, although this usage seems rare.

Some searches: I'd like to say that man-made things do not have intentions, only persons and groups of persons, but especially written things such as laws refute this idea, and there is even the apparently rare usage with tools. Dan Polansky (talk) 08:09, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
 * - Congress and legislature lead; person has fairly low frequency but the search below for "my intention" etc. shows much higher frequencies

Intention behind
Sometimes, the intention is behind. Some quotations from Wikisource: Some quotations from Google Books: Dan Polansky (talk) 08:17, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
 * - behind is relatively rare
 * General intention behind the provision
 * The legislative intention behind this section of the Act is clear.
 * she had divined the intention behind her mother's tolerance
 * the judge who delves deeply in search of the intention behind the deed
 * For there was no mistaking the definite intention behind his vague appeal;
 * the basic intention behind the writing of the work was for motion picture use
 * What was the intention behind not making any direct reference to his predecessor in that speech?
 * That is the real intention behind this legislation.
 * So then one might say that the intention behind improvisational practices is to bring out movement knowings using embodied intuition for the purpose of developing choreography.
 * Thus a single provision must not be interpreted in a way that is not in accordance with the intention behind the whole text.
 * But this is contrary to intuition: for we surely feel far more certain about the meaning of a sentence than about the intention behind it.
 * The intention behind others' behavior will clearly show you what is really going on with them and clarify what potential exists in those relationships.
 * Realizing the intention behind one's actions through meditation and other ascetic practices becomes therefore the way out of karma for Buddhist believers.
 * Note that the intention behind something is just as important as the action itself.
 * What was my intention behind my behavior?

RFV discussion: August 2022–February 2023
Rfv-sense: To intend.

Not in modern dictionaries, unless I have overlooked something. Not a single example sentence. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:29, 19 August 2022 (UTC)


 * shows that there is a verb, but what it means is less clear. In the 2013 and 2016 cites I put at Citations:intention it seems like a jargony (philosophical?) way of saying something in the vein of "have an intention", but in the 2015 cite it coordinates with and could also be viewed as something in that vein. - -sche (discuss) 20:54, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
 * It looks like some kind of continental philosophy jargon. Maybe  is the way. Or remove the sense as unattested and leave the quotations only in Citations:intention. There is a reference to Husserl in one of the quotations, so it would be phenomenology. From SEP: "Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object", boldface mine. So it really looks like phenomenology. --Dan Polansky (talk) 16:53, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Could there be a connection to common terms like well-intentioned, which seem to use it as a verb as well?
 * Ioaxxere (talk) 17:20, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I think well-intentioned = well- + intention:noun + -ed. Compare well-mannered: this does not depend on verb manner. --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:52, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
 * A formal definition would probably be "to manifest intention". This is different from "to intend", because it doesn't require the thing being intended to be specified, as the point of focus is on the existence of the intention itself (rather than its object). I consider this cited, to be honest, but agree that a philosophy label is probably appropriate. Theknightwho (talk) 19:34, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
 * How do you know these things? I cannot say the provided quotations reveal as much. If we had Husserl's definition, that would be something.
 * Maybe the label should not be "philosophy" but "continental philosophy" or "phenomenology" so that the reader does not get the impression an Anglophone philosopher would normally use the word. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:37, 22 August 2022 (UTC)


 * I added some more cites, and some more text to the cites. The philosophy cites indeed seem to be phenomenology, Dan is on the money there. I discern at least two strains of use: one or more philosophy senses (three cites refer to Husserl, two don't; there are probably(?) enough citations on Google Books and Scholar which use the word outside of quotes of him to meet CFI's "independence" criterion), and a new-age sense for which I've also found 3+ cites (probably allowing it to be a separate sense). - -sche (discuss) 00:04, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

RFV Passed Ioaxxere (talk) 19:56, 9 February 2023 (UTC)