  The connection of practical reason with intentional action raises large questions about its credentials as a capacity for genuine reasoning.  As noted above, intentional action is not mere bodily movement, but reflects a distinctive attitude of the agent’s, viz., intention. To be in this kind of mental state is to have settled on a plan which one seeks to realize through one’s action. Intention seems in this respect to be strikingly unlike belief.  Propositional attitudes of the latter sort have a representational function; they aim to fit the way the world is, so that if one discovers that the world is not how one previously took it to be, one will acknowledge pressure to modify one’s belief in the relevant dimension (pressure to which one will respond if one is not irrational). With intentions however things seem crucially different in this respect (Smith 1987).  The intention to go shopping on Wednesday, for instance, is not a state that would or should be abandoned upon ascertaining or confirming that one has not (yet) gone shopping on Wednesday; rather a person with such an intention will ordinarily try to bring the world into alignment with the intention, by going shopping when Wednesday comes around. Intentions are in this way more like an architect’s blueprints than like sketches of an already-completed structure (Anscombe 1957; compare Velleman 1989).