Abstract

In computational cognitive science, a valuationist picture of human agent architecture has become widespread. At the heart of valuationism is a simple and sweeping claim: Every time an agent acts, they do so on the basis of value representations, which are, roughly, representations of the expected value of one’s response options. In this essay, I do three things. First, I give a systematic, philosophically rich account of the valuationist picture of agency. I also highlight the generality of the model in explaining diverse forms of person-level agency. Second, I discuss connections between the valuationist model and two traditional models in philosophy, the belief/desire model and the decision-theoretic model. Valuationism is related to both, but critical differences remain. Third, I canvas the wide-ranging implications of valuationism for philosophical inquiry. Among other things, valuationism illuminates the elusive boundary between activity and passivity; it flips the standard philosophical understanding of decision around, with decision being a source of, rather than a product of, one’s agency; it reconceptualizes motivation as, in part, a representational phenomenon; it challenges a philosophical dogma that control over action is more extensive than control over belief; and it offers an intriguing “accuracy-based” approach to the normative criticism of agency.