Warren, on the centrally important point that some parts or our decision making is nondeliberative, and some parts are deliberative, I couldn't recomment more highly the recent work of _my_ intellectual mentor and thesis advisor Larry Wright. See his: Larry Wright, "Argument and Deliberation: A Plea for Understanding", _Journal of Philosophy_, Nov. 1995, pp. 565-585. Wright, IMHO, (and I am biased on this matter), is one of the great thinkers currently on the scence. Alex Rosenberg bluntly calls Wright the most important writer on teleology since Aristotle (see Wright, _Teleological Explanation_), and he does so without any tone of exageration. >From my own perspective, this work on teleology is just a part of far deeper insights on deliberation, skills, argument, and understanding which are to be found in Wright. Some of Wright's own intellectual mentors and influences include Michael Scriven, Norwood Hanson, and Wesley Salmon as teachers, and Thomas Kuhn and Ludwig Wittgenstein and intellectual in- fluences. I think, Warren, that you will find Wright's discussion of the role of background understanding, tacit nondeliberative skill, and argument structure in deliberative argumentation to be helpful in thinking about the some of the relations between nondeliberative and deliberative decision making. Greg Ransom Dept. of Philosophy UC-Riverside [log in to unmask]