1 Two boundaries of intention-attribution Emanuele Arielli Paper presented at the Voluntary Action conference, Delmenhorst, April 2000 1. Introduction 2. A problem of definition? The difference between an “intentional (voluntary) action” and an “intended action” 3. The “first boundary” of intention-attribution 3.1 A digression 4. The “second boundary” of intention-attribution 5. Essential bibliography 1. Introduction In order to attribute to a person that the outcome of its action was intentional, we should rule out cases in which this outcome was the product of sheer luck in very improbable circumstances and cases in which this outcome happened by reasons completely different from the person’s original plan. In doing this, I will define two “boundaries” in the mechanism of folk-psychological intention-attribution concerning, firstly, the probability of a causal chain between an action and its outcomes and, secondly, the “match” between intended plan by the agent and actual events that have taken place. First of all, for the sake of simplicity, I will consider the term “voluntary” to be similar to “intentional”, although some problems could arise, since we also should distinguish between intentional and intended, as John Searle notoriously pointed out. Secondly I will assume that an action is something that can be usually expressed by a verb and, most important of all, that almost every verb can be the expression of an action (although all exiting verbs in a language cannot cover all exiting action-types). This means that not only bodily movements are actions (so-called “basic actions”) but also more complex events can be considered as such. “To kill/elect/please someone” are actions, not only effects of basic actions (such as moving a finger and then pulling the trigger