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ABSTRACTS

Deni Walsh

Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda, Ruhr University Bochum
Charting Contrasting Stances on Organismal Purposiveness and Agency in Early Twentieth-Century Biology

In the historiography of biology, there is a significant gap concerning how organismal purposiveness and its cognate concept ‘agency’ were discussed by experimental and theoretical biologists during the first decades of the twentieth century. Here, I will offer a systematic reconstruction of the positions at play in different disciplines and argue that it is possible to identify –at least– six distinct stances apropos organismal purposiveness and agency that scientists customarily assumed: (i) the neo-Aristotelian answer; (ii) the heuristic approach; (iii) the holistic alternative to purposiveness; (iv) purposiveness eliminativism; (v) organismal agency as a noetic principle (related to scientific understanding and the intelligibility of biological practices, e.g., in animal behavior); and (vi) organismal purposiveness and agency as explananda for biological research. After outlining these standpoints by focusing on representative defenders, I will zoom out to the broader network of authors discussing these issues and conclude that debates revolving around organismal purposiveness and agency were not allotted to the fringes of early twentieth-century biological science but rather spanned through multiple disciplines and research traditions.

Samir Okasha, University of Bristol
The Metaphor of Agency in Biology

It is striking that evolutionary biology often uses the language of intentional psychology to describe the behaviour of evolved organisms, their genes, and the process of natural selection that led to their evolution. Thus a cuckoo chick 'deceives' its host; a worker ant 'prefers' to tend the queen's eggs to those of other workers; a swallow 'realises' that winter is approaching and 'wants' to escape it; an imprinted gene 'knows' whether it was inherited paternally or maternally; and natural selection 'chooses' some phenotypes over others. This intentional idiom is a symptom of a broader way of thinking about and modelling evolution, which I call 'agential'. This involves treating evolved entities, paradigmatically individual organisms, as if they were agents trying to achieve a goal, namely maximisation of reproductive fitness (or some proxy). The use of rational choice models, originally intended to apply to deliberate human action, in an evolutionary context, is one symptom of agential thinking. I offer a cautious defence of agential thinking in evolutionary biology. I argue that this mode of thinking does genuine intellectual work, and is not 'idle metaphor'; however it must be used with care, for it rests on an implicit empirical assumption that is not always satisfied.

Gregory Radick, University of Leeds
Vervetese and its contexts

In 1980 the ethologists Dorothy Cheney, Robert Seyfarth and Peter Marler, then based at the Rockefeller University, published the results of soon-famous fieldwork on the alarm calls of vervet monkeys.  Using experimental playback of recorded alarm calls, the group claimed to have established that those calls were rudimentarily semantic, in that they conveyed information not just about the emotional state of the caller, but about the nature of the environmental threat – specifically, whether a leopard or an eagle or a python was present.  In this paper I'll explore some historical and philosophical issues raised by one of the criteria that Seyfarth, Cheney and Marler applied in testing for call semanticity: that an animal signal counted as (at least rudimentarily) semantic only if it could be shown to elicit the same response across different contexts.

Gregory M. Kohn, University of North Florida
In defense of the whole: behavioral novelty as a reflection of organismal agency

Traditionally, the emergence of adaptive behaviors was explained as an outcome of selection acting on genetic programs. According to this view, the unity of the organism is epiphenomenal, as organisms are merely vehicles containing sets of selected genetic programs that predispose individuals to certain types of adaptive behaviors. However, all animals also exhibit creativity by expressing novel and immediately functional behaviors –ranging from slight postural changes to complex motor patterns— that could neither be prescribed nor predicted within the framework of genetic predispositions. But does such creativity change the function of behavior in development and evolution, or can such novelties be ignored as mere noise? Here I propose that novel behaviors are reflections of organismal agency, where the goal of an organism’s actions is to construct and sustain its far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic state. I highlight contexts where an organisms’ goals are inadequately served by the activation of ancestral adaptations, and thus the construction of new behaviors becomes necessary. To persist and thrive in such contexts the organism reorganizes existing biological systems to construct behaviors that are discontinuous with its phylogenetic and developmental histories. The production of novelties is thus a reflection of the goals of the whole organism and cannot be relegated to either random responses to environmental changes or evolved programmed responses. I conclude by proposing that the study of behavioral novelties offers opportunities to build an empirical science of organismal agency within the field of animal behavior.

Bendik Hellem Aaby, KU Leuven
Agency as a Capacity

Agency is a capacity we ascribe to entities in order to highlight particular things they are capable of doing. In its most inclusive sense, agency is the capacity of an entity to be a subject in a sentence to which an action verb can be predicated (e.g., the chair seats people). In this sense, agency is located wholly within our language and does not belong to the “furniture of the world”. However, agency can be seen as something more than a mode of description. In the context of organismal agency, I argue that agency is the capacity of a biological entity, acting as a whole, to perform goal-directed behavior which is under some the degree of control of said biological entity. This involves the putative agent possessing a range of abilities whose combined exercise constitute an instance of agential behavior. By paying close attention to the grammar and logic of capacities and abilities, I argue that we can make progress on some of the pressing questions regarding agency in non-human organisms. As an example, I show that claims that organisms which lack nervous systems are incapable of agency suffer from not properly appreciating that agency is a capacity.

Sonia Sultan, Wesleyan University
Organismal agency via unscripted developmental response to the environment:
a case study in plants

Developmental plasticity in response to environmental conditions is a characteristic property of organisms. This property is particularly well studied in plants. Developing plants adjust functionally key traits (such as leaf size and structure and allocation to specific tissues) in response to resource levels, providing an individual mode of adaptation. Biologists have generally accounted for this plasticity by viewing such responses as genetically programmed, thus maintaining a view of development as pre-scripted (vorher geskriptet) in the genome by natural selection.   Recent studies of transgenerational plasticity provide new insights to the nature of development that challenge this view. Experiments testing contrasting soil moisture and light environments show that parental--and even grandparental-- conditions affect progeny development and fitness. Moreover, the ancestral environment affects how offspring individuals respond to their own conditions, revealing that plastic developmental responses to a given environment are not pre-determined by genotype. These multigeneration plastic responses instead point to an active, unscripted process of developmental integration that takes place in real time, locating phenotypic agency in the developing organism.

Francesca Michelini, University of Kassel
Plessner’s philosophical biology and enactivism Elements for a comparison

In my talk I will try to highlight whether (and to what extent) a correspondence can be detected between Plessner’s conception of the organism and that of autopietic enactivism. I will focus in particular on two points. Firstly, I will make a comparison between the enactivist notion of organic self-individuation and Plessner’s fundamental idea of the realisation of the boundary. Secondly, a I will dwell on the similarity between Plessner and Buytendijk's notion of environmental intentionality (Umweltintentionalität) on the one side, and the enactivist notion of sense-making on the other side. My aim is to discover what conceptual contribution Plessner can offer to enactivist theory and what basic differences remain between the two conceptions.

Andrea Gambarotto, UCLouvain & Matteo Mossio, CNRS
Enactivism and the Hegelian Stance on Intrinsic Purposiveness

Since its inception at the end of the twentieth century, embodied cognition has progressively established itself as a valuable alternative to mainstream computationalism, notably by ascribing an active role to the organism in determining cognitive phenomena. In this paper, we assess the specific place occupied by enactivism within the landscape of embodied cognition, by bringing to the fore the specific way it conceives of the relation between intrinsic purposiveness, agency and cognition. In doing so, we argue that enactivism – understood as a branch of the theory of biological autonomy, and therefore in the specific sense of ‘autopoietic’ or ‘autonomist’ enactivism – adopts what we characterize as a ‘Hegelian stance’ with regards to these notions.

Within the theory of autonomy, we distinguish two different research directions, that correspond to two different routes to the naturalization of purposiveness: organizationism and enactivism. We suggest that these two routes mirror the attitudes upheld with regards to intrinsic purposiveness by Kant and Hegel, respectively. Kant’s approach is characterized by the tension between his scientific commitment to mechanism and the manifest purposiveness of organized beings. By facing this tension, organizationism attempts to understand how intrinsic purposiveness is realized by the organization of biological parts into a whole. Hegel’s approach, in turn, is epitomized by the infamous claim according to which teleology is ‘the truth of’ mechanism. We interpret this claim as suggesting that purposiveness should not be understood as an explanandum, but rather as an explanans of scientific discourse. Accordingly, the focus is shifted from how purposiveness emerges from the constitution of the whole through the parts, to how it manifests itself in the behavior of the organism as a whole in relation to its environment. This is the Hegelian stance we find at work in enactivism. This means that the key aspect of enactivism consists in presupposing the realization of a purposive organization, and shifting the focus to the interactive phenomena that it generates as a whole.

Jan Baedke, Ruhr University Bochum

Persisters vs. overcomers:

Why only organisms are agents and other biological individuals are not

This paper addresses the relationship between organismality and biological individuality when it comes to agency. It argues that organisms are agents in a way no other living systems are. Recently, philosophers of biology have clarified different kinds of individuality of living beings (e.g. metabolic, reproductive individuality) but largely failed to show how individuality and organismality differ. A historically influential view understands organisms as self-organizing systems whose parts maintain them as functional wholes. I argue that this view of organisms as persisters (i) cannot distinguish organisms from other self-maintaining individuals (e.g., holobionts, colonies), and (ii) neglects crucial dynamics characteristic of organisms. This refers to organisms’ ability to de- and re-organize their individuality (e.g., from metabolic to reproductive individuality) during development to become qualitatively different wholes. By drawing on cases of sexual parasitism, mammalian life cycles, and reproduction in eusocial insects, I develop a view of organisms as overcomers that solves these two problems. It clarifies the special explanatory roles of organisms as agents in biology. While persisting biological individuals have many epistemic functions (e.g., to count offspring for measurements of reproductive fitness, measure and explain population size and dynamics, distinguish development from reproduction) the epistemic role of organisms as overcomers (agents) differs from these. I argue that the organism concept should be central for explaining particular kinds of agency with elevated degrees of freedom and possibilities to change conditions of their individuality, as a reaction to environmental cues and ecological challenges. This focus on organismal agency is crucial to study the origin of a particular set of variation that is fundamental for evolutionary novelties and major evolutionary transitions to occur.

Denis Walsh, University of Toronto
Far from the Tangled Bank: Agency, summoning, and sedimentation

I contrast two perspective that one might take on evolution: the gene-centred and the agential. Drawing on recent work in scientific perspectivism I argue that the ontology of the Modern Synthesis is built from within the gene-centred perspective. One potential pitfall of a scientific perspective is what Winther calls 'pernicious reification', the illicit projection of the ontology of the perspective onto the world. Recent empirical failures of the gene-centred perspective suggests that the standard Modern Synthesis conception of evolutionary processes is one such illicit projection. This motivates an alternative, agential, perspective.The central feature of the agential perspective is that of an organism as an agent embedded in a system of affordances. From this view organisms enact evolution by responding to the saliences of their environments. The processes of evolution look very different from this perspective. I borrow two concepts from Merleau-Ponty—summoning and sedimentation—to describe them.

Kevin Mitchell & Henry D. Potter, Trinity College Dublin
Naturalising Agent Causation

The idea of agent causation - that a system like a living organism can be a cause of things in the world - is often seen as mysterious and deemed to be at odds with the physicalist thesis that is now commonly embraced in science and philosophy. Instead, the causal power of organisms is attributed to mechanistic components within the system or derived from the causal activity at the lowest level of physical description. In either case, the 'agent' itself (i.e., the system as a whole) is left out of the picture entirely, and agent causation is explained away. We argue that this is not the right way to think about causation in biology, or in systems more generally. We present a framework of eight criteria that we argue, collectively, describe a system that overcomes the challenges concerning agent causality, in an entirely naturalistic and non-mysterious way. They are: 1) Thermodynamic Autonomy, 2) Persistence, 3) Endogenous Activity, 4) Holistic Integration, 5) Low-Level Indeterminacy, 6) Multiple Realisability, 7) Historicity, 8) Agent-Level Normativity. Each criterion is taken to be dimensional rather than categorical, and thus we conclude with a short discussion on how researchers working on quantifying agency may use this multi-dimensional framework to situate and guide their research.

Anne Sophie Meincke, University of Vienna
A Bio-Processual Metaphysics of Agency

How does agency fit into the natural world? Up until today, metaphysicians – traditionally being concerned with human agency – have been struggling with giving a convincing answer to this question. Attempts to naturalise agency by conceptualising action causation as a species of mechanistic event causation effectively eliminate their explanandum. Agent-causal theories, on the other hand, save agency at the cost of failing to provide a naturalist explanation. In my talk, I argue that overcoming this dilemma requires not only deanthropocentring the debate but moreover a fundamental revision of metaphysical assumptions. Metaphysicians ought to give up the common mechanistic-physicalist view of nature, and the traditional ontology of static things that sustains it, in favour of a metaphysical framework that recognises the biological and, hence, processual constitution of agents – both human and non-human. The bio-processual metaphysics of agency that I propose makes actions intelligible as a particular form of the interactions with the environment any organism, qua stabilised higher-order process, has to perform in order to maintain itself. For biological agents, agency and persistence through time are ontologically coupled. This reveals the robust reality of agency in biology. Agency is naturalised without being eliminated.

Jan Baedke
Sonia Sultan
Anne Sophie Meincke
Bendik Hellem Aaby
Samir Okasha
Francesca Michelini
Andrea Gambarotto
Gregory Radick
Kevin Mitchell
Gregory M Kohn
Alejandr Fabregas Tejeda
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