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 perception-action 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