ABSTRACT
The philosopher J.R. Searle argues that the personal experience of intending to do something which leads to action is undeniable. Analysing the concept further he says the content of intention is the experience of action. Intention is claimed by J. S. Bruner to precede, direct and provide a criterion for terminating an act. In his account there are some ways in which intention enters regulation. Regulation from both intentional processes and feedback processes is based on knowledge. Intention is at the very roots of the development of competence in infancy, because rudimentary activities which are evoked enable performance-directed regulation to occur. Under appropriate conditions it leads in early reading to a general performance strategy of anticipation from semantic and syntactic cues. The arousal of a primitive intention to act on the world provides a set of conditions for very effective learning. It does so because it allows for performance-directed regulation and, as a consequence, learning activities.
