test if the treatment was successful by trying to move her legs. But trying and failing to move the legs is different from intending to do it later or merely wishing to do it: only in the former case does the patient learn that the treatment was unsuccessful. There is a sense in which tryings either take place or not, but cannot fail, unlike actions, whose success is uncertain. This line of thought has led some philosophers to suggest that the trying itself is an action: a special type of action called basic action. But this claim is problematic since it threatens to lead to a vicious regress: if something is an action because it was caused by a volition then we would have to posit one more volition in virtue of which the first trying can be regarded as an action. An influential criticism of the volitional explanations of actions is due to Gilbert Ryle, who argued that volitions are either active, in which case the aforementioned regress is inevitable, or they are not, in which case there would be no need to posit them as an explanatory inert "ghost in the machine". But it has been suggested that this constitutes a false dilemma: that volitions can play an explanatory role without leading to a vicious regress. John Stuart Mill, for example, avoids this problem by holding that actions are composed of two parts: a volition and the bodily movement corresponding to it. Volitions can also be used to explain how the agent knows about her own action. This knowledge about what one is doing or trying to do is available directly through introspection: the agent does not need to observe her behavior through sensory perception to arrive at this knowledge, unlike an external observer. The experience of agency involved in volitions can be distinguished from the experience of freedom, which involves the additional aspect of having various alternative routes of action to choose from. But volition is possible even if there are no additional alternatives. Volitionalists usually hold that there is a causal relation between volitions and bodily movements. Critics have pointed out that this position threatens to alienate us from our bodies since it introduces a strict distinction between our agency and our body, which is not how things appear to us. One way to avoid this objection is to hold that volitions constitute bodily movements, i.e.