Intentions as Complex Entities

In the philosophical and cognitive literature, the word ‘intention’ has been used with a variety of meanings which occasionally
have been explicitly distinguished. I claim that an important cause of this polysemy is the fact that intentions are complex
entities, endowed with an internal structure, and that sometimes different theories in the field are erroneously presented
as if they were in conflict with each other, while they in fact just focus on different aspects of the phenomenon. The debate
between Gallese’s embodied simulation theory and Csibra and Gergely’s teleological stance hypothesis is discussed as a case
in point, and some misunderstandings occurring in that debate are analyzed. The thesis that intentions are complex entities
is argued for by shedding light on the following aspects of intentions: conscious control; perceptual (and not only motoric)
representations of end-states; attributions of value to those representations; appreciation of the rational relationships
between means and ends.