Abstract

Crispin Wright has argued that our concept of intention is extension-determining, and that this explains why we are so good at knowing our intentions: it does so by subverting the idea that we detect them. This paper has two aims. The first is to make sense of Wright's claim that intention is extension-determining; this is achieved by comparing his position to that of analytic functionalism. The second is to show that it doesn't follow from this that we do not detect our intentions. Wright has conflated two questions. Firstly, do we detect our intentions? Secondly do we detect the concept of intention itself? The extension-determining account returns a negative answer only to the second.