¹ I am grateful for comments from the audience at the RIP conference on Action and Agency, and from Richard Holton, Lloyd Humberstone, Matthew Nudds, Mike Ridge, David Velleman, Denis Walsh and Timothy Williamson. I'm aware I have not always profited by their generous responses as well as I should.

² James, William, ‘The Sentiment of Rationality’, in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Norwood, Mass: Plimpton Press, 1896), 96–7Google Scholar.

³ ‘Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingness to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance’ (The Will to Believe, 90.)

⁴ See e.g. Ridge, Michael, ‘Humean Intentions’, American Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1998), 157–78Google Scholar (this description massively oversimplifies his proposed view). Anscombe's example is in Intention (Oxford:Blackwell, 1957), p. 56Google Scholar.

⁵ See e.g. Bratman, Michael, ‘Cognitivism about Practical Reason’, 250–1, in Faces of Intention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Velleman, David, Practical Reflection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 109Google Scholar; also available on-line at Velleman's website. Intention is belief-like in its direction of fit (representing its content as true) and in its aim for truth (being regulated by mechanisms which revise it in the face of counter-evidence); these features justify the label ‘belief, according to Velleman, but the label is not what matters. Extensive references to views ascribing a more modest role to belief in intention, such as those of Gilbert Harman, Paul Grice, and Robert Audi, are cited at p. 113 note 8.

⁷ Velleman, , The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 26Google Scholar. I do not attend here to the development of his view since the original presentation; in particular I shall skate over the distinction between a drive for self-knowledge as a desire, and as a regulative aim.

⁸ Paralleling this phenomenon of desire-driven belief, one might identify belief-driven desire of these two corresponding varieties: (a) I desire that p because I believe that p is true. What would be envisaged here is a stoical matching of desire to what the world is believed to offer. I believe I am destined to be a housewife, so being a housewife is what I desire, (b) I desire that p because I believe that I desire that p. I am told, by credible authority, that all Australians love to watch cricket. Believing I am Australian, I believe I will love to watch cricket. As a result, I come to love to watch cricket. This contrast is discussed in joint work by Richard Holton and Langton, in progress.

⁹ Williams, Bernard, ‘Deciding to Believe’, in Problems of the Self (1973), 136–51Google Scholar; 148. Implications of this for feminist critique of reason are drawn in Langton, ‘Beyond a Pragmatic Critique of Reason’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (1993), 364–84Google Scholar, where I argue that pragmatic critique of ‘male’ cognitive strategies—for example, that they serve men's interests and hurt those of women—fails adequately to explain them, or damn them. (Reprinted in Langton, Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005Google Scholar), forthcoming.)

¹⁰ 1 Corinthians 12: 9–10. Thanks to my mother, Valda Langton, for reminder of the reference.

¹¹ James, ‘The Will to Believe’, in The Will to Believe, 23–4.

¹² See e.g. Langton, , ‘Feminism in Epistemology: Exclusion and Objectification’, in Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy, eds. Hornsby, Jennifer and Fricker, Miranda (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

¹³ James, The Will to Believe, 61.

¹⁴ James, The Will to Believe, 103. Self-verifying belief is not quite the same as self-fulfilling belief—belief that produces evidence for itself might not be belief that fulfils itself—but the talk of ‘fact’ shows that what James has in mind here is belief that is self-verifying because it is self-fulfilling. Mind you, such a contrast will be relevant to his example of theism, given the contrast between theistic belief supplying subsequent evidence for itself, and making itself true (the latter being a considerably stranger doctrine than the former).

¹⁵ James, ‘The Will to Believe’, in The Will to Believe, 25.

¹⁶ Velleman, Practical Reflection, 129

¹⁷ Velleman, Practical Reason, 26; roman numerals added.

¹⁸ For a survey of a range of attempts to identify what ‘direction of fit’ consists in, together with an original alternative proposal, see Humberstone, Lloyd, ‘Direction of Fit’, Mind 101 (1992), 59–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; a paper to which I owe a great deal.

¹⁹ For Velleman only the first of the three listed features deserves the name ‘direction of fit’, which he uses in a narrow sense for the distinction between representing something as true and representing something as to be made true. This feature distinguishes beliefs and imaginings, together, from desires.

²⁰ This distinguishes beliefs from imaginings, as well as from desires. When you imagine something, you represent something as true without aiming to represent something that really is true; when you believe something you aim to represent it as true only if it really is true.

²¹ Practical Reason, p. 25

²² So much for possibility: what of rationality? Here it may depend whether one has an internalist or externalist understanding of what makes belief rational. If his religious belief is not in fact ‘reliably connected to the truth’, it is, though possible, irrational, by externalist standards. But if instead what matters is internal to the mind, the belief may be not only possible but rational. To be sure, it rests on a false belief that belief in God is self-fulfilling (which in turn may have an irrational source): but the wishful belief-forming process is itself a rational one, since it can be regarded as aiming at the truth.

²³ James, ‘The Will to Believe’, 12. He thought that when we have faith, we know, but we do not know that we know.

²⁴ Humberstone, ‘Direction of Fit’, 62.

²⁵ This is not supposed to be a merely terminological point about how the label ‘knowledge’ is to be used. Observe too that even if one were to allow intention to count as knowledge of what one will do, it would be a knowledge so deeply entwined with error it is not obvious that it deserves the name (intellectualist rhetoric notwithstanding). When I intend to buy butter, I believe I will buy butter, and my belief makes me buy butter— given my background aim of knowing what I am doing. That is, in some sense, why I do it. But if asked, I will surely deny that is why I do it. If Velleman is right, my answer shows that I am profoundly in error. Velleman does not pretend that this is what we—consciously, explicitly— think we are up to when we act on our intentions. He allows that the background aim for self-knowledge is regulative, comparable to the background aim of avoiding pain when moving about, something that guides what we do without presenting itself as an explicit goal. He allows that we may be ignorant of our actions’ constitutive aim. But ignorance understates the point. Ignorance is not mistake. If asked, ‘in moving about like that, were you aiming to avoid hurting yourself?’, a reflective response might well be ‘yes, perhaps so—I hadn't realized’. If asked, ‘in putting the butter in the basket, were you aiming to know what you are doing?’ a reflective response is likely to be a simple no. The account implies that here we have mistake, and not just ignorance. The aim ascribed to us is not simply sub-agential, unconscious: it is actually at odds with what we believe we believe we are up to. So whenever I intend to do something, I am making a cognitive mistake. This, if nothing else, is a strange outcome for so vividly rationalistic an account of intention.