Intentional action without action

Abstract A common experimental method in the philosophy of action is to ask study participants directly for their agreement with a sentence like ‘X did A intentionally’. Our study utilizes this popular method and investigates whether there are instances in which participants are comfortable with saying that an agent intentionally performed an action even though the action did not occur. Our results indicate that this is the case. In light of this evidence, we posit two possible conclusions: either non-specialists are in great error about the conception of intentional action, or experimental methods that ask directly for intentionality ascriptions are unreliable. We argue that the latter is the more reasonable conclusion and suggest that a popular methodology in experimental philosophy of action should be re-evaluated.