Defining Agency: Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry, and Spatio-temporality in Action

By Xabier E. Barandiaran, E. D. Di Paolo, Marieke Rohde. Adaptive Behavior, 2009

450 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The concept of agency is of crucial importance in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and it is often used as an intuitive and rather uncontroversial term, in contrast to more abstract and theoretically heavily weighted terms such as intentionality , rationality, or mind. However, most of the available definitions of agency are too loose or unspecific to allow for a progressive scientific research program. They implicitly and unproblematically assume the features that characterize agents, thus obscuring the full potential and challenge of modeling agency. We identify three conditions that a system must meet in order to be considered as a genuine agent: (a) a system must define its own individuality, (b) it must be the active source of activity in its environment (interactional asymmetry), and (c) it must regulate this activity in relation to certain norms (normativity). We find that even minimal forms of proto-cellular systems can already provide a paradigmatic example of genuine agency. By abstracting away some specific details of minimal models of living agency we define the kind of organization that is capable of meeting the required conditions for agency (which is not restricted to living organisms). On this basis, we define agency as an autonomous organization that adaptively regulates its coupling with its environment and contributes to sustaining itself as a consequence. We find that spatiality and temporality are the two fundamental domains in which agency spans at different scales. We conclude by giving an outlook for the road that lies ahead in the pursuit of understanding, modeling, and synthesizing agents.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, History and Philosophy of Science, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ff2fcad7794d3953bfbcb5c9c7e671da350ab622

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In History and Philosophy of Science

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Autonomy and Enactivism: Towards a Theory of Sensorimotor Autonomous Agency (2017, background): “…entity that is different from its environment [individuality condition], (b) this system is doing something by itself in that environment [interactional asymmetry condition], and (c) it does so according to a certain goal or norm [normativity condition]’’ (Barandiaran et al. 2009, p. 369).”
Horizons for the Enactive Mind: Values, Social Interaction, and Play (2010, methodology): “…l (a) 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 100 95 90 85 80 75 70 65 60 55 (b) a previous interaction; that is, they are capable of interactional coordination but not of one-sided coordination (the same result has been found in models of detection of social contingencies; see Di Paolo, Rohde, and Iizuka 2008).”
Sociality and the life–mind continuity thesis (2009, background): “Beer 2000). What is additionally needed is a more detailed non-species-specific operational mechanism to account for the transformative potential of such cognitive extension as it relates to agency (Di Paolo 2009). To be sure, the desirability of a more encompassing theoretical account is not denied”
The sense of agency – a phenomenological consequence of enacting sensorimotor schemes (2017, background): “Barandiaran et al. (2009) have synthesized this idea into an operational definition of minimal agency that is captured in three individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions.”
The rise and potential of large language model based agents: a survey (2025, unknown): “These years, plenty of research indicates that pre-trained models can learn universal language representations [181–183], and with only a small amount of data for ﬁne-tuning, it can demonstrate excellent performance in downstream tasks [184].”
Natural Agency: The Case of Bacterial Cognition (2017, background): “A recent attempt to avoid this commitment appeals to the distinctive ‘autonomous’ organization of living systems (Barandiaran et al. 2009; Moreno and Mossio 2015; see also Juarrero 1999).”
Emergent vision system of autonomous virtual characters (2016, background): “The agency concept introduced by Barandiaran et al. [20] says that an autonomous agent is the one which actively maintains its own viability conditions, i.e., the actions performed by the agent are necessary parts of the dynamics that de ﬁ nes its own existence.”