  Donald Davidson [1980, essay 3] asserted that an action, in some basic sense, is something an agent does that was ‘intentional under some description,’ and many other philosophers have agreed with him that there is a conceptual tie between genuine action, on the one hand, and intention, on the other. However, it is tricky to explicate the purported tie between the two concepts. First, the concept of ‘intention’ has various conceptual inflections whose connections to one another are not at all easy to delineate, and there have been many attempts to map the relations between intentions for the future, acting intentionally, and acting with a certain intention. Second, the notion that human behavior is often intentional under one description but not under another is itself hard to pin down. For example, as Davidson pointed out, an agent may intentionally cause himself to trip, and the activity that caused the tripping may have been intentional under that description while, presumably, the foreseen but involuntary tripping behavior that it caused is not supposed to be intentional under any heading. Nevertheless, both the tripping and its active cause are required to make it true that the agent intentionally caused himself to trip. Both occurrences fall equally, in that sense, ‘under’ the operative description. So further clarification is called for.