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11 - The intentional continuum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2014

Alessandro Duranti
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Summary

Introduction

In this concluding chapter I argue that, rather than discouraging any use of “intentions,” the various cross-cultural, cross-linguistic, and historical analyses presented in the prior chapters have shown the need to formulate a more contextually rich and contextually sensitive notion of intentionality as a pan-human capacity to attend to all kinds of real and imagined entities while giving them meaning. I believe that some notion of intentionality – and thus some notion of “intention” – is needed if we want to make sense of how people orient themselves in the social world, anticipate the actions of others, and follow their own instincts, intuitions, moods, needs, and desires. Rather than just being another “language game” (Wittgenstein 1958), a discussion of “intentions” – which includes a critical stance toward it – is important for an anthropological understanding of human agency as constrained by existing relations of power and yet sometimes resistant to long-established institutional practices. One lesson of our interpretive journey has been that the reliance on intentions and their apparent avoidance must always be contextualized. The notion of “intentional continuum” will be here introduced as a way of making sense of the contextual variability in intentional action that I documented in this book.

The meaning of intentions and their uses

As discussed in Chapter 2, three prominent philosophers of language used the notion of “intention” to explain how people make sense of what someone means in saying something. I called this view the “Standard Theory.” It adopts a commonsense notion of intending to characterize a relationship of agency and (sometimes) responsibility between persons and their acts. Within the “Standard Theory,” there are some differences. Grice (1957) used the verb intend to explain what makes a given utterance meaningful for both speakers and hearers. Austin (1962, 1975) used “intention” in his “felicity conditions” for all kinds of speech acts, including promises. Searle (1983) went beyond speech, extending the use of intentions to provide his own definition of what counts as “action.”

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The Anthropology of Intentions
Language in a World of Others
, pp. 233 - 242
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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  • The intentional continuum
  • Alessandro Duranti, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book: The Anthropology of Intentions
  • Online publication: 18 December 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139207706.011
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  • The intentional continuum
  • Alessandro Duranti, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book: The Anthropology of Intentions
  • Online publication: 18 December 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139207706.011
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The intentional continuum
  • Alessandro Duranti, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book: The Anthropology of Intentions
  • Online publication: 18 December 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139207706.011
Available formats
×