  Earlier we introduced the Cognitivist view that intentions are special kinds of beliefs, and that, consequently, practical reasoning is a special form of theoretical reasoning. Some theorists of action have been attracted to Cognitivism because of its promise to vindicate Anscombe’s (admittedly controversial) claim that, in acting intentionally, we have knowledge of what we’re doing that we do not get by observation. But an opposing tradition has been at least as equally prominent in the last twenty-five years of thinking about the nature of intention. Philosophers in this tradition have turned their attention to the project of giving an account of intention that captures the fact that intentions are distinctive mental states, states which play unique roles in psychological explanations and which are subject to their own sorts of normative requirements.