La prueba de la intención y la explicación de la acción

Abstract

This article approaches the problem of attributing intentions to others, trying to relate that issue to, on the one hand, the philosophical problem of the explanation of human actions and, on the other, the procedural-law problem of the proof of criminal intent. Two kinds of conceptions are distinguished from each other, depending on whether they take up or not a cognitivist stance towards the validity of such attributions. The article supports the cognitivist conception, and proposes an outline for reasoning, appropriate for judicial proof of intention, that is based on a Minimal Rationality Principle: the point is to show the connection between intention and rationality, and to suggest that this connection can be used to prove intention.