The Bratmanian creation myth is pragmatic but also diachronic and individualist. Intentions have a purpose or teleofunction. This function is pragmatic insofar as the main benefit attached to intentions is to allow us to secure greater desire satisfaction. The way intentions secure this benefit is by allowing us to organize and coordinate our actions diachronically, in other words to become planning agents. As noted by Velleman, this emphasis of diachronicity and future-directed intentions leaves present-directed intentions without a clear function. Finally, this myth is to a large extent individualist. While planning agency also enables inter-individual coordination, the social dimension of intentions remains secondary in Bratman’s account and again his main concern is with diachronically organized joint actions.
While the social creation myth also sees intentions as having a pragmatic purpose, in contrast to the Bratmanian myth, it emphasizes the social and synchronous dimension of intentions. Instead of self-coordination over time, it emphasizes cooperation and flexibly coordinated joint action as the main route to greater desire satisfaction. It thus reverses the Bratmanian perspective in proposing that intentions are designed to enable a more efficient online coordination of joint action and in considering future-directed individual or joint planning as derivative or secondary functions of intentions.
Because its main emphasis is on synchronicity rather than diachronicity, the social creation myth has no problem attributing a pragmatic control function to present-directed intentions. It is thus impervious to one of the attractions of the Anscombian creation myth. We need feel no temptation to attribute an epistemic function to present-directed intentions for lack of any other plausible option. The social creation myth, however, does not dispense with epistemic functions altogether, quite the reverse. Not only is the fact that intentions embody a form of self-knowledge essential to their role in the coordination of joint actions, but in addition the way intentions play their coordinative role is by contributing to the alignment of representations with co-agents and thus to the production of shared knowledge. Thus, on the social creation myth, the epistemic function of intentions is not just to provide us with self-knowledge about our intentions and actions, it is also to contribute to the formation of shared knowledge. However, the social creation myth remains closer to the pragmatic than to the epistemic creation myth in considering that the epistemic function of intentions is ancillary to its pragmatic purpose.
Finally, is the social creation myth a teleological myth or, like Velleman’s myth, the story of a spandrel? I must admit that I am not sure what the answer to this question is or should be. Indeed, this was one of the reasons why I chose to call my story a creation myth. One thing is sure though, if it is a story about a spandrel, this spandrel is not the same as Velleman’s. His spandrel is a by-product of curiosity and self-awareness. This spandrel, if it is one, would involve a third element, sociality or cooperativeness. Social theories of consciousness (Frith 2010; Graziano & Kastner 2011) propose that consciousness has evolved to facilitate social interactions and enhance social cooperation. On the one hand, a capacity for consciousness is of course a much more general capacity than a capacity for conscious intentions and this may suggest that the latter, as a by-product of this more general capacity, is itself merely a spandrel. On the other hand, if the ultimate purpose of consciousness is to enhance social cooperation, then conscious intentions are a key element in making this possible and calling our capacity for intention a spandrel would fail to do justice to their role.