Experts and Deviants: The Story of Agentive Control

Abstract

This essay argues that current theories of action fail to explain agentive control because they have left out a psychological capacity central to control: attention. This makes it impossible to give a complete account of the mental antecedents that generate action. By investigating attention, and in particular the intention-attention nexus, we can characterize the functional role of intention in an illuminating way, explicate agentive control so that we have a uniform explanation of basic cases of causal deviance in action as well as other defects of agency (distraction), explain cases of skilled agency and sharpen questions about the role of thought in agency. This provides for a different orientation in the theory of action.