Is Deciding a Basic Action?

I challenge the popular view that deciding, understood as forming an intention, is a basic action. I propose a necessary condition for basic action, which I call Intend-ability: a basic action must be something the agent could perform as a direct execution of the specific intention to do it. But even when the agent intends to decide, say, to quit smoking, she cannot directly execute such an intention; she can at most bring it about that she decides to quit, by other actions, such as imagining herself with cancer. Because deciding fails Intend-ability, I conclude that it is not a basic action.

Deciding as a Controlled Achievement

This paper addresses a puzzling dilemma. If deciding to A is an action, it is anomalous because agents do not ordinarily intend to perform it. If deciding to A is not an action, decisions seem to fall outside the control required for responsibility. I propose an account that resolves this dilemma. Deciding to A is a controlled achievement: the nonactional culmination of resolving practical uncertainty. Without specifically intending to decide to A, an agent can form the intention to A as the competent execution of her intention to resolve uncertainty in the way she knows how. This preserves responsibility-level control over decisions without making them an anomalous kind of action. The account extends to judgment and ideation, and to fine-grained, often automatic components of skilled performance.

Creativity, AI, and the Puzzle of Credit

This paper asks what grounds credit for originating a creative idea. A creator can intend to solve an artistic problem but cannot intend, in advance, to form the exact novel idea without already possessing it. Recent accounts (e.g., Prodoehl, Peacocke) locate creative agency mainly in facilitating the production of ideas or refining an idea once it appears. I argue that idea formation itself can be a controlled achievement when it is the culmination of an intention-guided creative search structured by the creator's knowledge-how. On this basis, I explain how outsourcing ideation to AI changes the artist's credit.

Explaining Frege Cases from the Agent’s Point of View

The Explanation Objection, motivated by Frege’s puzzle, holds that Russellian theories of psychological content cannot account for the different explanatory values of mental states that share the same Russellian content. A bold Russellian response, called Exceptionalism, maintains that Frege cases are harmless exceptions to the law-like generalizations grounding intentional explanations, and the Explanation Objection is thus undermined. Focusing on Almotahari and Gray’s (2021) most recent defense of Exceptionalism, I show that it fails to save Russellianism. I bring attention to a crucial challenge overlooked in the Explanation Objection, namely, enabling an action explanation to capture the agent’s perspective so as to rationalize the action. I argue that Exceptionalism fails to meet this challenge. Finally, I assess the failure of Exceptionalism and suggest that Russellians should either reject the thesis that psychological explanation is in terms of intentional contents or adopt a “relationistic” shift from the naïve form of Russellianism.

A paper on belief and acceptance

A paper on control in epistemic akrasia

A paper on the timing of killing