Decision Competence Enablement (DCE)

Contemporary decision neuroscience models decision-making as a neural process involving evidence accumulation, valuation, and commitment. While these models successfully describe how decisions unfold once neural dynamics are operative, they systematically presuppose the biological availability of such dynamics. This paper identifies this presupposition as a conceptual gap in the scientific explanation of decision-making. I introduce the Decision Competence Enablement (DCE) framework, which specifies the physiological conditions under which neural decision models become applicable. DCE conceptualizes cardiac function and cardio-autonomic regulation as enabling infrastructures that make neural decision dynamics biologically possible. These processes neither encode decision content nor replace neural mechanisms. Rather, they constitute necessary preconditions for the initiation and stabilization of neural activity required for decision-making. By distinguishing enabling conditions from implementing mechanisms, the DCE framework clarifies why existing decision models—despite their empirical success—remain explanatorily incomplete. Decision competence is introduced as a distinct scientific explanandum, allowing the scope and limits of neural decision models to be explicitly articulated.