Responding by giving up one's means-end belief seems less rational than giving up one's end or intending the means.
Acknowledging these problems, some philosophers turn back to Davidson and the project of reducing intention to desire and means-end belief (see, especially, Ridge 1998; Sinhababu 2013).
Suppose that one ought to have the means-end belief and one ought (to intend to E and to intend to M).
However, one avoids incoherence by dropping the means-end belief, not intending to E, and not intending to M. Intuitively, one has satisfied some requirement.
(In Davidson's widely used phrase, the pro-attitude and associated means-end belief constitute a primary reason for the agent to F).
These implications make sense if intention is a species of desire that interacts with means-end belief when one does A with the intention of doing B. They are more difficult to explain if intention-with-which is the basic material from which intention and intentional action are built.
The Humean Theory of Motivation, as it has come to be known, postulates that motives must always be composed of desires for some end, possibly along with some relevant means-ends belief (Hume 1888, 413; Smith 1987).
The wide-scope strategy is thus also unable to avoid this implausible result when ends and means-end beliefs are unalterable.
It is not simply that we suppose that states of having certain pro-attitudes and of having corresponding means-end beliefs are among the causes of our actions.
As stated previously, Davidson and other action theorists defended the position that reason explanations are causal explanations — explanations that cite the agent's desires, intentions, and means-end beliefs as causes of the action [see Goldman 1970].
Instead, the model claims that when assessing intentional action, people not only attend to their representation of a person's "surface" self her expectations, means-end beliefs, moment-to-moment intentions, and conditional desires but also to their representation of the person's "deep" self, which harbors her sentiments, values, and core principles.
