Year: 2006
Type: article
Abstract: 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.
Author: Fred Keijzer
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1608397459