There is an increasing trend in research on the behavioral capacities of all kinds of organisms to invoke the concept of agency in a minimal sense. On a minimal account, the thought is, no organism will be a priori disqualified as a putative agent. It is also argued that agency construed in a minimal sense steers clear of overly “mentalisitic” commitments on behalf of the putative agent. Further it is also argued that a minimal sense of agency is an empirically tractable property of a living (or sufficiently complex) system.
But are minimal accounts of agency as good as advertised?
In this talk I will argue that there are significant drawbacks to minimal accounts of agency. In particular, I challenge the claim that minimal agency denotes an empirically tractable property. I do this by arguing that unless our concept of agency has some “mentalistic” commitment, we end up being unable to differentiate between agential behavior and behavior that is “merely” the result of a system with a sophisticated feedback control loop.