This started when I was reviewing a varied collection of literatures in behavioural psychology, behavioural economics, parts of philosophy and other areas for the purposes of theoretical and empirical work on problem gambling. I encountered claims that there was necessarily a ‘common currency’ in which the values of all options open to an agent were represented, or that there was in fact one because it had been found empirically, or that it would be morally good if there was one. I also encountered claims that it would be morally awful if there was such a thing, that there wasn’t in fact one for some kinds of agent (usually people) or that there couldn’t be one. Aided by my philosophical education, I figured that one claim couldn’t be necessarily true, contingently true, good if true, bad if true, contingently false and necessarily false all at once. I set out to write a nice clear review article that cleared things up. Things, though, turned out to be more messy than I’d realised, and so that article never appeared, but I found the claims people made about common currencies to be a useful ‘Rosetta stone’ for bridging otherwise separate and isolated discussions of agency.
I did some work on the evolutionary rationale for a kind of common currency, both in responding critically to Kim Sterelny’s treatment of the evolution of proto-desire in Thought in a Hostile World in “On The Natural History of Desire” (preprint), and in defending an alternative view in “The Descent of Preferences” (preprint). I also developed the constructive case for preferences in “Affording Affordances” (preprint), which was a contribution to a symposium on Daniel Dennett’s book From Bacteria to Bach and Back.
Talks and working papers:
“Time and the Decider” – I’ve long thought that Dennett’s argument about the impossibility of a ‘finish line’ for consciousness likely applies to other cognitive processes, including action selection. I’ve got a work in progress (for very small values of ‘work’ and ‘progress’) on this, which has led to a few talks and one very compressed treatment of the argument in a multiple review in Behavioural and Brain Sciences. (Preprint version)
“On the Priority of Preferences in the Evolution of Cognition” – Another working paper argues for a ‘preferences first’ account of the evolution of anything like belief-desire psychology. This has seen a few presentations, and one conference-paper sized published paper, and is currently in press. (Preprint)
With Daniel Dennett at the September 2019 conference in his honour, in Darwin, Australia. (I presented “Affording Affordances.”)
David Spurrett 