Agency

This note is about agency but it also relates to the notions of voice, action, cognition, consciousness.

Agent
Voice
Autonomy
Biosemiotics
Meaning
goals
teleonomy: directedness that self-reproducible systems acquire through evolution 1, the study of goal-directed processes 2

Definitions

"Agency is a matter of doing, trying, initiating. Agency is by-me-ness; it is being a source of action and its effects."

Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

Agency is a dynamical property of a system. Capacities to respond to the conditions:

transduce
configure
respond

Agential systems can maintain their stability in the changing conditions (all life has agency in a sense of resisting entropy).

Cf. Subjectivity

On the close relationship of consciousness and action, see:

Hurley, Susan L. Consciousness in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Levin, Michael, and Richard Watson. “Machines All the Way up and Cognition All the Way down: Updating the Machine Metaphor in Biology.” Seminars in Cell & Developmental Biology 177–178 (2026): 103668. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.semcdb.2026.103668.

In Biology

Modern Synthesis describes dynamical properties of populations at the cost of distorting the nature of biological processes that contribute to evolution.

The Agential Perspective represents biological process with greater accuracy but at the cost of generality.

Walsh, Denis M., and Gregory Rupik. ‘The Agential Perspective: Countermapping the Modern Synthesis’. Evolution & Development, 2023, 1–18. https://doi.org/10/gsmzs3.

Much novelty/innovation in evolution is possible without the need to evolve novel genes or cell types.

Sultan, Sonia E., Armin P. Moczek, and Denis Walsh. ‘Bridging the Explanatory Gaps: What Can We Learn from a Biological Agency Perspective?’ BioEssays 44, no. 1 (2022): 2100185. https://doi.org/10/gnj5tf.

Cf. levels of agency, organisational levels, boundaries of self/individuality.

Francis, Robert A. “Ecosystem Prediction and Management.” In A Companion to Environmental Geography, edited by Noel Castree, David Demeritt, Diana Liverman, and Bruce Rhoads, 421–41. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

From Regulation to Agency

An attractor requires no agent, so dynamical convergence turns into agency only at a price, and the price rises rung by rung:

Persistence: the pattern remains.
Attraction: trajectories converge after displacement.
Regulation: feedback counteracts deviations in particular variables.
Adaptivity: regulation adjusts in relation to viability boundaries before failure. Graded normativity arrives here.
Goal-directed agency: the system selects actions relative to an endogenously maintained condition across varying circumstances.
Collective agency: regulation closes at the collective level rather than existing as an analyst's aggregate.
Representational agency: internal models, memories, or anticipations do the selecting.

Persistence alone, the first rung, supports none of the later attributions. The middle rungs do real explanatory work, because organisms generate evolutionary novelty through plastic, goal-directed responses that population-level accounts miss (see In Biology above). The upper rungs remain contested, which makes the ladder a field of live hypotheses rather than a settled scale.1 2

On adaptivity as the source of graded normativity:

Di Paolo, Ezequiel A. “Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4, no. 4 (2005): 429–52. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-005-9002-y.

Barandiaran, Xabier E., and Matthew D. Egbert. “Norm-Establishing and Norm-Following in Autonomous Agency.” Artificial Life 20, no. 1 (2014): 5–28. https://doi.org/10.1162/ARTL_a_00094.

Operational questions for any alleged agent:

Question	Evidence sought	Failure mode
What is the candidate boundary?	Recurrent material or organisational closure	The analyst draws a convenient region
Which variable is controlled?	Perturb-and-recover evidence	Persistence without correction
What counts as error?	Response scaled to deviation	Reflexive covariance with a stimulus
Where is memory?	History-dependent response	Retrospective storytelling
How are actions selected?	Equifinal or context-sensitive alternatives	One fixed causal pathway
At what scale does control close?	Collective feedback irreducible to independent responses	Aggregation fallacy
Whose viability is served?	Named beneficiaries and costs	Harmony rhetoric masking conflict

Cf. Phase Space on attractors and targets, and Transformation on why retargeting as a design method assumes a system on the fifth rung or above.

In Novel Ecosystems

There is significant deterioration of information webs and information use in the current, rapidly changing world.

Information is a crucial aspect of organims' niches (all life uses information to act and make decisions) so the impact is far-reaching and undermines the functioning of ecosystems.

There is an urgent need to conserve, restore, and rebuilt information webs.

Szymkowiak, Jakub, and Kenneth A. Schmidt. ‘Ecology of Information Enters the Anthropocene’. Oikos 2022, no. 10 (2022): e09677. https://doi.org/10/gsm5w9.

In Design

Some benefits of agential perspective in design:

Better for specifying action. Concrete and actionable in the local circumstances with local stakeholders is more compatible with the practical circumstances of design because the responsibility of designers is often to take concrete, local action now. Thus, the agential perspective might be more actionable than the population-level view.

Opens the possibilities for rapid more-than-human innovation. The ability of agents to adjust in response to the environment in non-genetic ways is also relevant for design because design situations require innovative responses in periods that are much shorter than those typical for innovations achieved via random mutation.

Establishes the possibility for multiple ways to transmit relevant Information. There are many senders/sources and many receivers. What they perceive and how it matters to them differs from who they are and what they do. This opens possibilities for multiple simultaneous design actions.

In Education

“will and ability to positively influence [one’s own] life and the world around them” (OECD, 2019, p. 16; Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. OECD future of education and skills 2030)

References

Sharov, Alexei, and Morten Tønnessen. Semiotic Agency: Science beyond Mechanism. Cham: Springer, 2021.

Sharov, Alexei A. ‘Biology of Translation: The Role of Agents’. In Translation Beyond Translation Studies, edited by Kobus Marais, 63–80. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

Footnotes

Corning, Peter A., Stuart A. Kauffman, Denis Noble, James Alan Shapiro, Richard Irwin Vane-Wright, and Addy Pross, eds. Evolution ‘On Purpose’: Teleonomy in Living Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023.˄
Dresow, Max, and Alan C. Love. ‘Teleonomy: Revisiting a Proposed Conceptual Replacement for Teleology’. Biological Theory 18, no. 2 (2023): 101–13. https://doi.org/10/gsngq5.˄

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