Research Group »Limits of Intentionality« at the University of Konstanz

The Research Group »Limits of Intentionality« chose a topic that is especially controversial today and of great importance not only to our human self-understanding as rational agents, but also to the possibility of planned social cooperation and the guidance of agents through legal or moral norms and values. The members of the group were convinced that such a wide-ranging, multi-faceted topic could only be satisfactorily addressed by integrating various disciplines concerned with it. Their goal was to renew reflection on the conceptual, theoretical, as well as the empirical foundations of human intentionality and to determine its limits in a decidedly interdisciplinary context. This could of course only be accomplished in an exemplary and selective fashion, but in the hope that this work might provide impulses and inspiration for the larger scientific community. During two three-year grant periods the group consisted of 6 disciplinary projects which partly worked on their own, partly in direct cooperation with one another. The investigated topics included the following:

limits of intentional control resulting from a relative autonomy of bodily skills and sensomotor schemata (philosophy);
mechanisms linking stimuli and basic reactions on the microbehavioural level (cognitive psychology);
relations between behavioral control and emotion regulation in development and cultural context (developmental psychology);
limits of intentional control through if-then-plans due to the propositional contents of those plans (motivational psychology);
limits of the intentional control of automatic cognitive and affective processes of social response formation (neuroscience);
the significance of intentionality for the interpretation of the principle of democracy (jurisprudence);
the ascription of intentions and guilt in the context of Nazi trials in postwar Germany, in particular with regard to the so-called »Befehlsnotstand« (sociology).

All results were first presented and discussed in internal colloquia and workshops, and then also in external conferences, including some, usually international, organized by the group. The group’s work resulted in numerous publications, disciplinary as well as interdisciplinary. The volume »Acting intentionally: individually, groups, institution« (DeGruyter 2013) documenting the final conference of the group and central results of its research should be mentioned especially here. Various national as well as international cooperations were initiated or continued, often through lecture invitations and research stays. Finally, the Konstanz group has also supported students and early career researchers on various levels.

DFG Research Group No. 582