Differentiating Animality from Agency. Towards a Foundation for Cognition

The notion of cognition has been difficult to pin down. Embodied and situated approaches to cognition now suggests that agency, construed in terms of perceptionaction coupling, might provide a clear foundation for cognition. Yet, this attempt has problems of its own. First, a demarcation problem: Which systems are agents and why? Second, a graduality problem: Agency is a way of describing that is either used or not, and it is difficult to envision an incremental route toward agency. To overcome these problems, I differentiate between agency and a new notion, animality. Animality can be described as the sensorimotor organization by means of which animals modify environmental conditions. By developing this notion of animality I claim that it becomes possible to get a grip on the foundational problems of cognition and agency.