One variation on actual legislative intention is counterfactual intention (see Posner 1986). To say that the legislature had a particular counterfactual intention is to say that, if the legislature had considered the relevant issue, it would have had the intention in question. The metaphysical, existential, and epistemic problems are especially severe for counterfactual intentions. Moreover, because the focus is on what the legislature would have intended with respect to the specific issue before the court, counterfactual intentions tend to be understood as counterfactual application intentions rather than as counterfactual legal or communicative intentions. And the relevance of application intentions to legal interpretation is especially problematic. (see Greenberg and Litman 1998; Berman 2007, 385; 2009, 28; McConnell 1997, 1284; Whittington 2013, 382–83).