Tadeg Quillien (2026), Open Mind, vol. 10, 857–883 — DOI-10.1162/OPMI.a.361
Key takeaways
- The folk concept of intentional action tracks whether the agent’s desire was a strong (necessary and robust) cause of the outcome, which is why lucky successes are judged unintentional.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-092. What follows is what the work says about itself.
The paper asks whether an action can be intentional when success was improbable, a case where folk intuitions follow a complex pattern. Quillien proposes a causal theory: people call an outcome intentional when the agent’s desire for it was a strong cause of it. When chance decides the outcome, the desire is judged a weak cause, and intentionality ratings drop with it. Across studies, participants who deny that a lucky outcome was intentional also deny that it happened because of the agent’s desire. Intentionality judgments follow causal judgments more closely than they follow rival explanatory factors.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 5 seconds of active reading over 1 session. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-092 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — Worth reading as the cleanest current statement and test of the causal (desire-causes-outcome) account of folk intentionality under luck. It has pre-registered designs, open data and an honest discussion of the half-mediation and the Kraemer divergence. Its evidence is correlational and its “model” is verbal, not computational.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-092, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: low — 5 s dwell. It is experimental philosophy of action, and the skim captures its thesis and design.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-092 is that reading):
- Connects the concept of agency to counterfactual and causal-strength models (necessity and robustness). This is relevant wherever intentionality or responsibility is attributed to automated agents.
- Check the effect sizes and the item-level correlations (Fig. 6) to see how much causal judgment adds beyond know-how and probability-raising.
- Check the Study 2 divergence, which may be where the account is weakest.
Access when seeded: direct.mit.edu returned 403 for both the article and the PDF. The open-access (CC BY) full text came from PubMed Central (PMC13327788) via curl. Read the abstract, keywords, the introduction subsections (Our Proposal; Causation and Counterfactuals; Other Recent Accounts; Overview of Empirical Tests), the General Discussion opening and the Conclusion. The study Methods and Results were not read. Crossref gives vol. 10, pp. 857–883, published 2026-06-17.