Instincts and intentions

In writing circles, you'll often hear people referring to themselves as "plotters" or "pantsers" as a way of indicating their writing process. For those of you unfamiliar with this concept, the idea is that you have, on one end of a continuum, the writers who meticulously plan out ("plot") every arc and beat of their story, and that on the other end of the continuum are the writers who never plan, and prefer to tell stories "by the seat of their pants", as it were. Most people sit somewhere between the two extremes, but usually have a preference leaning one way or the other—those who land firmly in the middle have taken to calling themselves "plansters".

The reason I'm talking about plotting and pantsing is because it highlights an interesting dichotomy in writing processes, or perhaps more accurately in creative processes in general: that between creating according to an intended plan and creating purely on instinct. As indicated by the plotting-to-pantsing continuum above, we generally use a mixture of intention and instinct when we create things, but a lot of us will rely more on one or the other. However, our preference may not necessarily be the same in all types of work; I sit very heavily on the side of plotting for any narratives longer than a single scene, but for short pieces or informal essays I don't really plan much at all. And, to bring in another craft, I'm so unlikely to follow a crochet patten faithfully that I've more or less given up on using them entirely.

All of which has me wondering: is there really as much of a dichotomy between instinct and intent as we think there is? And why do we think of it as a dichotomy, anyway?