intentions vs rules

ID: bdcdc268-16f9-4cd8-b01f-e21af66ec0b4
MTIME: [2025-06-30 Mon 20:47],[2025-06-30 Mon 19:24],[2024-12-25 Wed 16:06]
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Intentions and rules are both features of the imagined world that act upon the real world - i.e. heterotopias - but both do so differently.

An intention is an action together with a description of an action, or a potential action together with a description of a potential action. The thinking is that actions that you take "on purpose" are constructed as follows:

take your image of the world as it appears to be now
describe a specific way it could change
select among actions that "could cause that difference".

You could say that the description of the change that generates the action describes the action itself. Hence, action under a description.¹

Call the world-model taken together with the description of a change that it could undergo a theory of change.

Given an observed action, one can conjecture meaningfully about the theory of change that generated it: any action will be more congruent with some theories of change than others. One can also deduce that the agent cares about the change happening, because it moved them to act.

You would need additional information to deduce why they care; this distinction is what distinguishes Anscombe's concept of intention from her concept of motivation. She wants to restrict the former word to the psychological phenomenon for which the action itself always provides least some evidence.

People switch between theories of change often, because narrowness. They are also, uh, not always effective. When an action doesn't work as intended, they will update their theory of change to account for what actually did happen.

Therefore, claims about theories of change rapidly fall off in likelihood as the scope of the theory gets broader and as the causal chain being presented for analysis gets longer. Long causal chains and broad classes of actions impose high burdens of proof.

Therefore understand intention as a local tool of analysis in both the causal and logical domains.

A rule is also a description of actions, but instead of a general-purpose tool for agents to analyse each other it's a totem around which agents can coordinate.

1. todo this note is about the descriptive–normative agent-concept pipeline and why it happens. I'm thinking the effect occurs because we're familiar with both modes as themselves being strategic tools that synergize well in social games of ideas.

This node is a singleton!

Footnotes:

The abuse of notation that absorbs the hypoethesised psychological antecedents of an action into the action itself seems to have a lot to do with fundamental attribution error.