Intention

An 'intention' is an image, usually visual or linguistic, that precedes some movement. A long tradition has often interpreted an intention as a prevision of the completion of the movement that follows it, as if that completion already existed in the future, and it were drawing one towards it. Dewey offers an important challenge to such an interpretation, distinguishing between an 'end-in-view', and an 'end'. While the latter is the actual termination of the movement, the former is at best a piece of imagination, the function of which is it to initiate and guide immediate action. But Dewey's analysis applies to only unreflective contexts, and, hence, is incomplete. In a Reflective context, an end-in-view is not merely an isolated given, but an imaginative modifciation of the activities presented by Reflection. Unreflectively, for example, an end-in-view for taking a walk might be 'to visit a friend'. Reflectively, the end-in-view 'visiting a friend' is a modification of what one has just been doing, e. g. sitting home reading, a variation of what one has been doing that conjures up, e. g. images of past visits to the friend, images of the friend, etc., that is an accommodation of some impulse.