Eve Poirier (The Queen’s College): 'What Can I Intend to Do?'
Abstract: If the question is 'what can I intend to do?', then the answer is 'quite a lot of things', so the better question to be asking is 'what can I not intend to do?', or more precisely, 'what constraints are there on what I can intend to do?' I'll look at two different approaches to tackling this question. Firstly, we could see this as a question about human psychology, and so seek out psychological constraints on intentions: features of human minds that restrict the possible outcomes of our intention forming processes. Alternatively, we could see this as a question about our concept of intention, and so look for conceptual constraints: features of the concept of intention which restrict the scope of its application, limiting the circumstances in which it is true to say that an individual is intending to do something. I'll argue against the psychological approach and put forward my own conceptual view: there are conceptual constraints on intention, but they must be understood as a global rationality requirement and cannot be formulated into specific hard-line criteria.
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