Abstract

I will concentrate on the 'executive' conception of intentions and intentional actions. I will argue that intentional bodily movements have distinctive observable characteristics that set them apart from non-intentional bodily motions. I will also argue that that when we observe an action performed by someone else, the perceptual representations we form contain information about the dynamics of movements and their relations to objects in the scene that can be exploited in order to identify at least the more basic intentions of the agent. In the final part of the paper, I will offer some suggestions as to how this capacity to perceive the actions of other agents as intentional relates to our capacity to recognize our own actions as intentional.