[Taraz]

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A major problem, as tame deuces alluded to, is that our actions quite often have little to do with our initial goals and intentions.

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Just because your intentions change easily or rapidly for reasons you don't fully understand (or anyone else, including psychologists) doesn't mean that our actions have "little to do with our goals and intentions". It's essentially meaningless to claim that someone can act (in the purposeful sense of the word) other than as they intend at the time of the action. "I punched him in the face, but I didn't intend to." Uh, yes, you did. It might not have been your initial goal or intention, but it was certainly your goal and intention at the time you acted.

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We give post hoc explanations for a large percentage of our actions and we are very, very easily manipulated by outside factors.

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Sure. But that doesn't mean that prior intent (whatever that is) did not exist. Clearly it did, or you wouldn't have acted.

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These two go hand in hand. What I am saying is that we very often don't know why we have acted in a certain way and we make up stories to justify/explain them. When I used the term "initial goal" I meant that we have one intention going into the action and then after we have acted in conflict with our beliefs we say, "oh I must have actually wanted to do X instead." Think of it in terms of cognitive dissonance if you know what that term means.

There was a recent study that I read about using a neuroscience technique called TMS. This tool basically magnetically stimulates part of your brain so that it's functioning is depressed. The researchers showed that people performed certain motor actions before they were consciously aware of the intention to do so. It was a really fascinating study, I'll try to dig it up. You can chalk this up to "reflex" if you want, but some of these actions were quite complex. There are lots of actions that are actually "reflexes" in this sense for which we construct just so stories.

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While I don't think anyone would argue that we don't have any control over our actions, it is also very important to recognize that there are often much more powerful explanations for our actions aside from our intentions.

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This seems meaningless to me, an arbitrary division. While there might be many things contributing to what forms our intentions, claiming those things to be somehow different from intentions actually seems not just meaningless, but wrong. If these other things don't contributate to the formation of intent, what does?

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But they are quite different. Is something a goal or an intention if we aren't consciously aware of it? If I act because of situation A but I believe that my goal is actually B, was A actually my intent? I would argue that it was not. I guess this is kind of a semantic argument, but I want to be clear here. We normally understand intent as conscious planning, but we often unconsciously do things in conflict with these plans.

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Practically the entire field of social psychology is dedicated to discovering these other factors and we've learned quite a lot about how and why we act.

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I.e., how we form and modify our intentions.

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Again, are they intentions if we don't know that why we are acting in this way?

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I don't see how talking about this "obscures" the fact that we have intentions. It is every human's default belief that we have intent and it's not likely that anybody would deny this in any absolute sense.

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That's exactly what the OP did.

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I believe the OP was saying that all of our actions aren't a result of our intentions. If he was suggesting that none of our actions flow from our intentions I would disagree with him.