Full Description
How and to what extent do people take into account the intentions of others? Alessandro Duranti sets out to answer this question, showing that the role of intentions in human interaction is variable across cultures and contexts. Through careful analysis of data collected over three decades in US and Pacific societies, Duranti demonstrates that, in some communities, social actors avoid intentional discourse, focusing on the consequences of actions rather than on their alleged original goals. In other cases, he argues, people do speculate about their own intentions or guess the intentions of others, including in some societies where it was previously assumed they avoid doing so. To account for such variation, Duranti proposes an 'intentional continuum', a concept that draws from phenomenology and the detailed analysis of face-to-face interaction. A combination of new essays and classic re-evaluations, the book draws together findings from anthropology, linguistics and philosophy to offer a penetrating account of the role of intentions in defining human action.
Contents
1. Rethinking anti-intentionalism; 2. Intentions in speaking and acting: the Standard Theory and its foes; 3. The avoidance of intentional discourse: a Samoan case study; 4. The invention of promising in the Samoan translation of the Bible; 5. Intentionality and truth, revisited; 6. Speaker intentions and the role of the audience in a political campaign in the US; 7. A dialogue on intentions; 8. Opacity of other minds: local theories revisited; 9. Intentions and their modifications: a lesson from Husserl; 10. A sense of the other: from intentionality to intersubjectivity; 11. The intentional continuum.
