Proponents of the “inquisitive theory of mind” argue that intentions are among the attitudes which are question sensitive. Understood this way, to form an intention is to settle on an answer to a ‘practical questions,’ a question about what to do. But what is an answer to a practical question, and what is it to “settle” on one answer over others? In this paper I argue that, contra the extant question-sensitive theory of intention (Beddor & Goldstein 2023), settling on an answer to a practical question involves being in a mental state with imperative content. Hence, the question-sensitivity of intention recommends against the standard view on which intentions are attitudes toward propositional contents. On the view I defend, Imperativism, to intend to φ is to occupy a mental state with content akin to the imperative “φ!” in natural language. Imperativism is closely related to the most widely discussed non-propositionalist theory, the “do-ables view,” on which the content of an intention is an infinitival clause (e.g., “to φ”). While both the do-ables view and Imperativism capture the intuitive sense in which the objects of our intentions are acts, I show that only Imperativism can be plausibly squared with question-sensitivity.
