Natural Agency: An Ecological Approach

Agency, the capacity to act for a goal or purpose guided by norms, is central to our understanding of the capacities and activities of organisms including human beings. However, its distinctive purposive and normative character has proven difficult to integrate with the scientific understanding of organisms as natural physical entities. The challenge is to show both that agency has a place in the natural causal order of the world as described by natural science (naturalism), and that its distinctive purposive and normative character plays an indispensable role in our understanding of natural phenomena (teleology). The standard approaches, however, either locate agency in the natural causal order of the world but fail to vindicate its distinctive purposive and normative character, or vice versa. My goal is to avoid this dichotomy and instead offer a complete unifying account of natural agency. In the first part of the thesis I address the methodology of naturalism. First, I argue that the standard approaches are committed to an unnecessarily stringent set of assumptions about what naturalism requires. And second, I propose an alternative methodological strategy based on scientific work in complex systems dynamics. In the second part I use this strategy to articulate a novel account of natural agency, The Ecological Theory of Agency. This account is based on recent empirical and philosophical work in evolutionary developmental biology on the organism-environment relation (Walsh 2013). An agent, I propose, is an ecologically embedded purposive system. That is, a system with the gross behavioral capacity to bias its repertoire in response to what its conditions afford for attaining its goals. Then I show how the solution that this account of agency provides generalizes to two other instances of the dichotomy. The first is the problem of bacterial cognition. I show how the ecological approach allows us to navigate a middle way between thinking of unicellular organisms as either mere automata or full-blown cognitive agents. The second is the problem the role that reasons play in the explanation of action. I show that the ecological approach avoids thinking of reasons as either exclusively causes or exclusively norms.Ph.D