2

A Gradualist Metaphysics of
Agency
Jesús H. Aguilar and Andrei Buckareff

Suppose that you just ate a meal. Having satisfied your hunger, you find
yourself craving a beer and realize that there is no beer left in the fridge.
You know that the corner store has a good selection of beers, so you walk
to the store to get some. At the same time that you finish your meal,
your cat finishes eating. Being in the habit of cleaning himself after
eating, he looks for a comfortable place and gets to work cleaning his
face. Both you and your cat are exercising agency. In your case, you do
so when you take a walk to the store to get some beer. In the case of your
cat, he exercises agency when he looks for a place to groom and sets to
grooming himself. It is clear that even if what you two are doing can be
done in automatic mode there is a difference between the walking and
the grooming on the one hand, and the process of digesting your respec-
tive meals on the other. And yet in all these cases you and your cat are
always doing something. In this respect, the walking, the grooming, and
the digesting, are cases of agency. In the case of walking and grooming,
you and your cat exhibit intentional agency; and in the case of digesting
you each exhibit a very modest species of (quasi-) agency. This generous
understanding of agency is controversial, to say the least. Some action
theorists will reject the idea that non-human animals like cats can be
true agents while some other action theorists will take the further step
of insisting that in cases like digestion there is simply no agency at all
since no one is really doing anything.
In this essay we reject such an exceptionalist view of agency and
argue in favor of a gradualist understanding of agency that accepts that
non-human animals like cats are agents, and goal-oriented processes
like digestion involve some species of agency. We endorse a bottom-up
approach to understanding agency and argue that, contrary to a widely
accepted view about agency, being an agent is not an all-or-nothing

30
 A Gradualist Metaphysics of Agency 31

matter. Rather, agency comes in degrees. According to this gradualist

metaphysics of agency lots of things can be truthfully described as
agents by exercising varying degrees of agency. Some of these things
exercise quite robust varieties of agency and show themselves to be
more complex agents than others. But complex agents are not the only
type of agent, nor do they always exhibit robust agency. More often
than not, the world exhibits lesser types of agential intervention that are
overwhelmingly more prevalent than their sophisticated counterparts.
In fact, they provide the foundations on which any agential sophistica-
tion is based, or so we will argue.
In the first section we provide a basic framework for thinking about
agency and present the features of the most basic form of agency, what
we refer to as ‘quasi-agency’. In the next section, we sketch an account
of what is involved in moving from quasi-agency to what may be more
recognizable as full agency, although of a modest variety – the sort
exhibited by most non-human animals. Not surprisingly, we label this
sort of agency ‘minimal agency’ and the sorts of agents who exhibit
it ‘minimal agents’. Full-fledged rational agency is examined in the
following section, particularly to distinguish it from minimal agency.
Finally, we consider an objection that could be raised to the gradualist
approach to agency that we offer in this essay.1

1 Quasi-agents

The following are often referred to as agents: chemicals, law enforce-

ment officials, persons with power of attorney, athletes, software, repre-
sentatives of entertainers and athletes, and so on. Do these things have
anything in common? At first glance, it seems the answer is ‘no’. But
there is something that all of these things have in common: they are
disposed to react in certain specific ways when they come into contact
with different properties of various objects.
Consider the familiar chemical compound sodium bicarbonate
(NaHCO3), commonly known as baking soda. Sodium bicarbonate has
dispositional properties/causal powers directed at neutralizing acids
and bases. It is a neutralizing agent. In virtue of its causal powers, it is
disposed to neutralize acids and bases. That is, sodium bicarbonate has
the power to neutralize. This property of sodium bicarbonate is directed
at producing a certain outcome when it comes into contact with objects
with the appropriate properties.2 Moreover, this property of sodium
bicarbonate is always directed at particular manifestations when part-
nered with different dispositional properties of objects. Take hydrogen
32 Jesús H. Aguilar and Andrei Buckareff

chloride (HCl), better known as hydrochloric acid. Sodium bicarbonate

is disposed to neutralize hydrogen chloride and in turn hydrogen chlo-
ride is disposed to be neutralized by sodium bicarbonate. When these
compounds are paired their relevant dispositional properties are mani-
fested in response to coming into contact with each other. One outcome
of the manifestation of these properties is sodium chloride (NaCl). What
is important to note is that, whether or not sodium bicarbonate is paired
with hydrogen chloride, it has the relevant causal power that is directed
at being manifested in a particular way producing a particular outcome.
Because of its causal powers a chemical compound like sodium bicarbo-
nate can accurately be described as an agent of some sort. Some explana-
tion is in order.
To the extent that a chemical compound can be described as an agent
it reveals something that is common to all things that can accurately
be described as agents: namely, their directedness. The causal powers of
a chemical compound can be described as directed to something beyond
themselves (Martin 2007: 59; Molnar 2003: 63). For instance, a power of
a compound is directed at producing certain outcomes.
If, as John Heil proposes, the dispositional properties of any object
include ‘a capacity to project to the non-existent’, which is a ‘mark of
intentionality’ (Heil 2003: 221), then the properties of all sorts of things
exhibit this mark of intentionality.3 For instance, what the causal powers
of a chemical compound are directed at can exist or not exist. Even if
there were no hydrogen chloride in this part of our universe, sodium
bicarbonate would still be directed at neutralizing it. A tree still has the
power of photosynthesis even when it is dark outside and would mani-
fest this power if sunlight were present. Finally, an artifact like a reliable
compass is disposed to point in the direction of the magnetic North
Pole even if it happens to be in a room full of high-power magnets that
prevent it from performing its normal function (Dretske 2002: 492–3).
What causal powers are directed at are not always things that exist in
their environment.
Dispositional properties can also be determinate or indeterminate
with respect to their directionality (Martin 2007: 59; Molnar 2003: 64).
So, for instance, C.B. Martin writes that, ‘[a] particular hen has or does
not have a set of dispositions and capacities for laying an egg (not any
particular egg), and furthermore, the hen might have a set of disposi-
tions and capacities for laying a particular egg provided by the causal
context’ (2007: 59). Similarly, a chemical compound can have a prop-
erty directed at a general sort of manifestation with a certain type of
property of another compound (for instance, the solubility of sodium
 A Gradualist Metaphysics of Agency 33

chloride is directed at dissolving when it is partnered with the power

of dihydrogen oxide to dissolve sodium chloride). The same disposition
can be directed at a specific manifestation with a specified manifestation
partner (the power of this portion of sodium chloride partnering with
the power of that dihydrogen oxide).
In virtue of the directedness of dispositional properties we can accu-
rately describe chemical compounds as exhibiting a very basic kind
of intentionality. In a minimal sense, a state exhibits some degree of
intentionality to the extent that it is: (1) about, for, or directed at some-
thing; (2) directed at things that are present or may not be present; and
(3) may exhibit indeterminacy with respect to what it refers (with its
reference fixed by context). In thinking animals, such as humans, their
thoughts exhibit intentionality. So, for instance, their practical thoughts
are directed at various actions and outcomes. The actions or outcomes
represented may or may not be present. And what is represented may be
an action type or action token. Of course, this list is not meant to be an
exhaustive list of what conditions must hold for the concept of intention-
ality to be accurately put to use. What the ingredients of intentionality
are is a matter of some controversy. But what we have listed are some
fairly uncontroversial necessary conditions that must be satisfied for a
state or property constitutive of a state to be described as intentional.
The intentionality of our thoughts is fairly robust, while the sort of
non-mental intentionality exhibited by the dispositional properties of
a chemical compound is minimal and evidently not sufficient for the
complex intentionality exhibited by systems that count as mental. But
the difference is not a difference in kind; it is a difference in degree.4 The
relevant properties of chemical compounds exhibit the necessary goal-
directedness for the proper application of the concept of intentionality
that we find in more robust forms in animals. Assuming naturalism,
it should not be surprising that objects with dispositional properties
exhibit the basic ingredients for mentality. If this is correct, there is a
minimal intentionality that the dispositional properties of chemical
compounds have which justifies our ordinary identification of objects
like sodium bicarbonate as agents. Still, to avoid confusion and keep
in place the evident agential differences in degree between things like
thoughts and the states of chemical compounds, we can refer to the sort
of minimal intentionality possessed by things like chemical compounds
as quasi-intentionality and identify them as minimal quasi-agents.
Despite the fact that the myriad types of quasi-agents have disposi-
tional properties that exhibit the mark of intentionality, they do not
qualify as agents in the sense in which people do. What is it then that
34 Jesús H. Aguilar and Andrei Buckareff

they are missing? In other words, what keeps us from treating chemical
compounds and similar substances as more robust agents? As we have
seen, it cannot simply be their lack of complexity or some kind of inten-
tionality, for they possess both.

2 Minimal agents

This brings us to the sort of intentionality exhibited by animals.5 Human

agents can be truthfully described as possessing intentional properties that
are constitutive of states identifiable as thoughts. It is this capacity to have
thoughts that has provided many otherwise quite different philosophical
views concerning human agents with the reason to treat them as metaphys-
ically exceptional. In one guise or another such metaphysical exception-
alism always insists that humans stand apart from any other known thing
with respect to their agential capacities to generate truly creative, autono-
mous, and responsible actions due to their capacity to think. The view
we champion here as a gradualist metaphysics of agency considers such
metaphysical exceptionalism as fundamentally mistaken and the source
of significant false starts in action theory, particularly when the capacity to
think is singled out in this way as the definitive agential capacity.
This raises a couple of obvious questions. First, what is there to having
a thought? Second, how is having thoughts connected to the exercise of
genuine intentional agency, however minimal? These are complicated
matters and cannot be settled here. So what follows should be under-
stood as a very basic sketch of what thought is and how it relates to
intentional agency.
A thought is itself a causally efficacious complex disposition of an
agent. Thoughts exhibit not only the sort of directedness and aboutness
characteristic of dispositional causal powers generally, but have represen-
tational content which in a very specific way determines their disposi-
tional directionality. Thus, agents act in response to the representational
content of their thoughts. Their thoughts are intentional states; and
their relevant practical thoughts are directed at actions and outcomes.
But, contrary to the exceptionalist tradition, we take thought, intention-
ality, and their contribution to agency, to be gradual phenomena occur-
ring inside a continuum, which goes from their most basic occurrences
to their most complex.
Some agents have a richer mental life and array of capacities than
others. But all agents exhibit to different degrees the sort of ability to
initiate and guide their behavior in response to their thoughts and
the features of the external world represented in their thoughts. These
 A Gradualist Metaphysics of Agency 35

thoughts are among the causal powers attributable to agents, playing a

causal role in the etiology and guidance of their purposeful behavior.
Moreover, some of these thoughts provide the reasons for which an
agent acts and enable us to explain why an agent does something. But,
again none of this is exclusive to humans.
Consider the following example. Fred is a cat. Fred hears and smells
a mouse. He seeks out the mouse and discovers it. Fred waits for an
opportunity to pounce on the mouse. He is alert and aware of what is
happening in his surroundings. He is sensitive to any changes in the
mouse’s behavior and makes adjustments in his posture in response.
When he recognizes that the mouse is at its most vulnerable, he attacks.
So, Fred is responsive to changes in how the mouse behaves, differences
in the terrain, and how he is progressing with respect to the goal of
catching the mouse. As Fred attempts to catch the mouse, he makes
changes in his own actions in response to how the world and his body
are represented in his thoughts. Whether finally successful or not in
catching the mouse, Fred is an agent who exercises genuine agency in
his hunting the mouse. So, it is also clear that Fred’s thoughts repre-
sent his environment, what he is preparing to do, and the movements
of his body. And because of the causal role Fred’s thoughts play when we
see him as a cognitive system, his thoughts can be variously identified
as beliefs, desires, intentions, and so on. It seems to us that only biased
metaphysical exceptionalist assumptions will lead an observer of Fred’s
behavior to conclude that no thought or real agency is there.
Thus, the correct view of the role of thought and intentionality in
agency is one that recognizes that such agential features are not found
exclusively in humans, but rather in all sorts of creatures that, like Fred
the cat, are capable of exhibiting the right type of dispositional traits.
We identify all these creatures as ‘minimal agents’. And, to be sure,
all minimal agents do things with and in response to their thoughts.
Just like Fred the cat, they act in response to their thoughts and such
thoughts enable them to guide their actions appropriately. Minimal
agents can be understood as exhibiting varying degrees of complexity in
their agency, and, hence, qua agents, they can be understood as existing
along a spectrum that moves from borderline quasi-agents to those that
fall short of what we identify as rational agents.

3 Rational agents

The sorts of agents with which we are typically concerned in the philos-
ophy of action are rational agents like normal adult humans. However,
36 Jesús H. Aguilar and Andrei Buckareff

the appellation ‘rational agent’ when used of human agents is somewhat

misleading. For instance, we do not expect that rational agents always
do what is rational. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that supports the
claim that humans are often quite irrational.6 Also, we do not mean
to suggest that only rational agents act for reasons. If we distinguish
between reasons as playing a motivating and explanatory role, then it
is possible that a non-rational agent can act for motivating reasons and
that these can serve as the explanatory reasons that can be offered to
account for its actions. Moreover, there is a sense in which, in the light
of a non-rational agent’s motivational reasons, a course of action can be
objectively interpreted as instrumentally rational. For example, if Fred
the cat wants food because he is hungry and believes that meowing will
get the attention of his human companions, his meowing, motivated
by his want and belief, is rational given his goal of getting fed. So, it is
appropriate to consider Fred as exercising his instrumental rationality in
order to get his food. This type of instrumental rationality is widespread
among many other creatures.7
Nevertheless, unlike other types of agent, rational agents can be
responsive to an array of reasons, under the description of normative,
and can be fairly criticized for failing to act on/for those reasons or
commended for acting on/for those reasons. That is, rational agents can
be held accountable for failing to conform to the demands set upon
them by external facts, the demands of morality, what is recommended
by their thoughts on a matter, and a whole host of additional factors
that may count as normative reasons. This capacity seems unique to
humans.
Consider the following example. Suppose that Lydia is a normal adult
human agent while Fred the cat is, of course, a cat. Suppose that Fred is
hungry. In an effort to get Lydia’s attention, Fred jumps onto the shelf
of a large bookcase in Lydia’s living room and pushes a Matryoshka
doll, knocking it on to the floor. Now, suppose that Lydia is also hungry.
Expressing her strong desire to eat she also knocks a Matryoshka doll
on to the floor as a way to get her partner’s attention about her strong
desire to eat something. There is an agential difference between Fred
and Lydia that separates them and their actions in a very important
sense. Only in Lydia’s case are we confronted with rational agency. And
yet such a difference cannot simply be owing to the presence or absence
of motivating internal states leading to things like the knocking of a
doll. Fred wants to eat and must get Lydia’s attention. Similarly, Lydia
also wants to eat and must get her partner’s attention. Fred believes that
he will get Lydia’s attention by knocking an object from the shelf. So
 A Gradualist Metaphysics of Agency 37

does Lydia. And yet, if you are Lydia’s partner, while you may be upset
with Lydia and blame her for breaking your Matryoshka doll, it will be
inappropriate to have the same emotional response with Fred.8 But,
again, what exactly justifies this different response? The answer brings
us back to rational agency. The difference between these two agents is
the sort of internal life that allows Lydia but not Fred to be responsive
to certain types of normative reasons. For instance, Lydia can appreciate
that the standard rules of etiquette would proscribe knocking items off
shelves. She would also understand the value of the Matryoshka doll
and realize how inappropriate it is to destroy it as a way to get her
partner’s attention about her desire to eat. And so on. But clearly Fred
has no such understanding of the impropriety of his behavior or of
the value of an object like a Matryoshka doll. And Fred lacks a general
capacity that would enable him to be aware and assess all the different
normative reasons involved in his action. In this sense, Fred is essen-
tially non-responsive to a set of crucial normative reasons that iden-
tify true rational agents and justify appropriate responses from other
agents. And yet, despite this striking difference between a non-rational
agent like Fred and a rational agent like Lydia, the difference between
them as agents in general is one of complexity and not a difference
of kind. They both are part of an agential continuum, in which some
agents are less complex than others, and where the more sophisticated
ones attain their sophistication by being capable of acting for a wider
range of reasons.

4 An objection: language, thought, and agency

The foregoing may have convinced some readers about the reality of
gradual agency. But there are others who will not be taken in by the story
we have been telling thus far. Such naysayers will insist that agency and
being an agent are not best understood in gradualist terms, with agency
and being an agent admitting of degrees. Such non-gradualists will
insist that being an agent and exercising intentional agency is an all-or-
nothing matter. One reason they may offer is that language is a funda-
mental capacity necessary for true agency; but language itself is not a
phenomenon that can be correctly understood as coming in degrees.
Thus, they would argue true agency in turn cannot be a phenomenon
that comes in degrees.
An influential account of language and agency along these excep-
tionalist lines is ascribable to Donald Davidson.9 Agents, Davidson
argues, must be language users since ‘in order to be a thinking,
38 Jesús H. Aguilar and Andrei Buckareff

rational creature, the creature must be able to express many thoughts,

and above all, be able to interpret the speech and thoughts of others’
(1982a: 322). So, for Davidson, being a rational creature and being a
language user come together. Moreover, he sees language as crucial to
making sense of actions as rational outcomes of internal states like
beliefs and desires since ‘without speech we cannot make the fine
distinctions between thoughts that are essential to ... explanations
[of actions, that] we can sometimes confidently supply [in terms of
beliefs and desires]’ (1984: 163). But what ultimately leads Davidson
to exceptionalism is that for him ‘a very complex pattern of behavior
must be observed to justify the attribution of a single thought’. Such
a complex pattern, Davidson insists, is only present in agents that
have language: which is to say, is only present in humans (1982a:
322). So, although his view is in principle open to the possibility that
as long as they satisfy the language requirement non-humans could
exhibit true agency, the fact remains that only normal language-using
human beings are known to satisfy this condition. But, more impor-
tantly for our purposes, even if in principle it is possible to accept
the existence of non-human real agents as long as they satisfy the
language condition,10 the metaphysical and explanatory gap remains
between those entities that satisfy the condition and those that do
not, without any gradation of agency in between. For, according to
this view, agency is the sort of thing that either you have or you do
not have, with nothing else in between.
Davidson’s case does not rest merely on the foregoing claims about
both purposeful behavior and interpreting such behavior. He also ties his
language-based view about agency to his account of fundamental prop-
ositional attitudes like beliefs. He argues that in order to have a belief
it is necessary to have the concept of a belief, and that only those enti-
ties who have language can have the concept of belief (Davidson 1982a:
324). For Davidson the very possession of a belief requires the concept
of a belief since such possession depends on the subject’s ability to think
about a belief under the description of being a ‘belief’. Furthermore,
since the concept of a belief is of a mental state ‘directed at truth’, being
capable of thinking about a belief as a ‘belief’ entails being surprised at
finding oneself believing something false as this would exhibit its failing
to satisfy its ‘direction of fit’ (Davidson 1982a: 326). These and other
significant features of the mental life required for agency to take place
are, according to Davidson, the marks of a true agent. Agency simply
does not exist without them. It is clear that, given the type of thinking
involved in this way of understanding agency, a gradualist approach
 A Gradualist Metaphysics of Agency 39

like the one we defend here would be seen as misguided. For an excep-
tionalist like Davidson, agency is a whole package that cannot be teased
apart in the metaphysically reductive manner underlying the gradualist
approach that we favor.

5 Response: not all thinking is linguistic

If Davidson and those who share similar views are right, then many of
the creatures who would count as agents on our account are not, in fact,
agents at all. This is so because they cannot be truthfully described as
thinkers. And they are not thinkers because they are not language-users.
However, contra Davidson, we can say that, while having the capacity
for speech and knowledge of a language can make action-explanation
easier and allow for very complex actions to be performed, language is
not necessary for every thought, and, a fortiori, is not necessary for the
type of agency that uses this type of non-linguistic thought. For some-
thing can be an agent and exercise the capacity for thought even if it
lacks the capacity for language.
As we noted before, we do not think of the correct application of
the concepts of ‘agent’ or ‘agency’ as an all or nothing matter. That is,
we think it is better to understand agency and counting as an agent
as coming in degrees.11 Returning to the example of Fred the cat: if
Davidson is right, then Fred should not be described as an agent and
he exercises no agency when he attacks a mouse. That is to say, Fred
does not intentionally attack the mouse. What he does cannot be accu-
rately described as an ‘intentional action’ and Fred cannot be truthfully
referred to as an ‘agent’. What about the complexity of Fred’s behavior?
Isn’t the complexity exhibited by Fred in how he behaves sufficient
to truthfully describe his behavior as intentional and, hence, for us
to truthfully say of Fred that he is an agent who exercises intentional
agency when he attacks a mouse and, hence, has thoughts? Davidson
has a response:

A creature may react with the world in complex ways without enter-
taining any propositions. It may discriminate among colors, tastes,
sounds and shapes. It may ’learn’, that is, change its behavior in ways
that preserve its life or increase its food intake. It may ’generalize’, in
the sense of reacting to new stimuli as it has come to react to similar
stimuli. Yet none of this, no matter how successful by my standards,
shows that the creature commands the subjective-objective contrast,
as required by belief. (1982a: 326)
40 Jesús H. Aguilar and Andrei Buckareff

So, while Fred the cat may exhibit complex behavior that suggests the
presence of thought, including beliefs, strictly speaking Fred is not a
thinking organism and, hence, not a true agent.
One obvious reply to those who endorse the sort of reasoning
defended by Davidson is to point out that the concept of belief is not the
same thing as having a belief (Heil 2012: 256). To take an analogy: for
centuries, humans did not have the concept of pathogenic bacteria. But
they were no less vulnerable to such bacteria. A human infected with
cholera or syphilis did not fail to have either infectious disease just on
account of not possessing the concept of a bacterium (or the concept of
cholera or syphilis, for that matter). This reply may satisfy some persons,
but for many it will seem that there is an important difference between
thoughts and bacteria. For one, thoughts can be reflected on in the first-
person and interpersonally. We can think about our own thoughts and
the thoughts of others. This is part of what Davidson seems to have in
mind in making his case for the interdependence of the capacity for
thought on the capacity for language. In response, it might be argued,
you can think about the probiotic bacteria in your body and think about
the probiotic bacteria in the body of a friend. But notice that a bacte-
rium, whether in your body or the body of a friend, is quite different
from a first-person representation of your mental state. A first-order
representation can be represented in higher-order thought. You can
believe that you believe things and believe that your first-order belief is
false upon reflection. The Davidsonian will insist that the representative
content of your higher-order belief in such a case requires that you have
the capacity for language.
There is another response to Davidson that is a bit more promising
(see Heil 2012: 265–73). Some thought requires the capacity to use
language (for instance, Davidson’s example of a higher-order belief
about a false first-order belief, articulating abstract ideas in your head,
and thinking about a grocery list you wrote out but forgot at home).
But not all thoughts are like this. Of course, all thinking is representa-
tional. But insofar as it is representational, it is best to think of thinking
as ‘a matter of using imagery’ (Heil 2012: 266).12 And not all conscious
thought involves the use of verbal imagery. Following John Heil, we will
take all imagery to be pictorial (2012: 267). So, some imagery involves
verbal imagery, but not all does. For instance, we may think about lines
from a poem or a remark someone made, but we can also think about a
meal we are preparing: how it smells, and how we expect it will taste. In
the case of Fred the cat, even if he is incapable of using verbal imagery
he can make use of non-verbal imagery in his thinking. What matters
 A Gradualist Metaphysics of Agency 41

is that he can use imagery in the way appropriate for him to count as
thinking, even if the imagery used is nonlinguistic.13
While not all thought is linguistic, involving verbal imagery, at least
some nonlinguistic thinking resembles linguistic thought. Davidson
seems to recognize this, but he resists labeling such activity ‘thought’.
Philosophers and cognitive scientists have suggested different ways in
which the thought of non-language users can exhibit features similar to
linguistic thought. For instance, C.B. Martin contends that, ‘nonlinguistic
activity at its most sophisticated and structured levels has a remarkable
pattern of parallels to linguistic activity’ (2007: 93). Martin refers to the
richer variants of such nonlinguistic activity, whether overt or covert,
as ‘protolanguage’. Protolanguage is not itself a kind of language. But it
has features in common with language. According to Martin ‘protolan-
guage is a structured, rule-governed network of semantic, procedural
activity prior and basic to linguistic activity, having an almost totally
unnoticed and surprising pattern of parallels to language itself’ (Martin
2007: 94). If you will, protolinguistic activity is a ‘procedural analogue’
to linguistic activity (Heil 2012: 270). This relates to the previous point
about imagery. There are protolinguistic procedures that Fred the cat
may employ involving the use of non-verbal imagery that parallel the
way in which a language user may use verbal imagery. For instance,
we can identify a protolinguistic procedure whereby Fred can discover
some truth about human behavior using a nonlinguistic analog to induc-
tive generalization. Fred has seen that when he is about to be fed one
of his human companions grabs a can and takes the lid off and scoops
food into a bowl. After a while, once he witnesses this occur enough, he
adjusts his behavior and simply waits patiently in the location where he
is fed once he notices this pattern of behavior in his human companions.
Fred makes connections between behavior types – even if the behaviors
are not identified under a particular linguistic description – and infers
that food is about to be served. In this case, there is a procedure aimed
at an outcome. The procedure and outcome could be expressed linguis-
tically via a simple inductive inference and the outcome would be the
conclusion (Heil 2012: 270–1).
If we are right, then it seems reasonable to hold that Fred the cat is an
agent. Fred is an agent in a way that a compass, a chemical compound,
and a tree are not. Fred engages in purposeful actions in response to how
the world is represented to him in his thoughts. Fred’s agency is not as
robust as what we find in normal human agents. While his agency is
more robust than the agency of a spider, owing in part to the richness of
Fred’s mental life vis-à-vis that of the spider, it is not as complex as what
42 Jesús H. Aguilar and Andrei Buckareff

we find in other agents, such as normal adult humans. Thus, we take the
degree to which something counts as an agent and the sort of agency
they can exercise to be a function of the complexity of their mental
lives. In this respect, Fred’s mental life is surely complex enough for him
to legitimately count as an agent.

6 Conclusion

In this essay we have articulated a gradualist metaphysics of agency. We

have defended the idea that being an agent and the exercise of agency is
not an all or nothing matter. Rather, we have argued that we find a very
rudimentary form of agency, which we labeled ‘quasi-agency’, in even
the simplest of objects. Such objects we can refer to as ‘quasi-agents’,
by virtue of their possessing dispositional properties that are directed at
particular manifestations when partnered up with other dispositional
properties. Such properties are directed at particular outcomes. This
directedness provides such objects with a rudimentary ‘about-ness’ or
‘directedness’ that is characteristic of intentionality.
The quasi-intentionality exhibited by the dispositional properties of
quasi-agents is amplified in more complex objects. Such objects are more
robust dispositional systems than simpler objects. They exhibit full-
blooded intentionality in their behavior (which is directed at outcomes)
and they exhibit intentionality in some of the causes of their behavior.
Specifically, the thoughts that cause their actions are intentional states
that represent the world as being in certain ways; and it is in response to
their thoughts that such agents exercise agency.
The difference between minimal agents and rational agents is ultimately
a difference in degree. Rational agents have the capacity to respond to a
wider range of considerations, including normative reasons. Hence, we
are justified in having certain emotional responses to their actions and
holding them accountable in certain ways appropriate for agents with
their capacities. Importantly, rational agents are just the most complex
agents that exist along a continuum with other types of agents.14

Notes
The order of names should not be taken to imply priority of authorship.
1. Many readers will likely be familiar with the recent work of Fred Dretske
(1999), Don Ross (2012), and Helen Steward (2012) on agency. Those readers
will no doubt recognize that, while Dretske, Ross, Steward, and the authors of
this essay have significant differences between one another, we stand together
in favoring a bottom-up approach to thinking about the metaphysics of agents
and agency.
 A Gradualist Metaphysics of Agency 43

2. Dispositional properties/causal powers are sometimes referred to as ‘poten-

tialities’ in Aristotelian metaphysics. ‘Power’ is perhaps the best transla-
tion of the term Aristotle uses, dunamis, in Metaphysics Z. On our account,
‘Dispositional property’, ‘potentiality’ and ‘power’ are just different ways
of referring to the same type of property. We avoid ‘potentiality’, however,
because of its rare usage in the recent literature in ontology.
3. See also Martin (2007: 59) and Molnar (2003: 63–4).
4. Martin and Pfeifer (1986) argue that many standard accounts of intention-
ality fail to distinguish intentional mental properties from allegedly non-
intentional dispositional physical properties. See also Borghini (2009), Heil
(2003) and (2012), Martin (2007), Molnar (2003: chap. 3), and Place (1996).
5. Much of what follows in this section and the next section reflects ideas devel-
oped by Dretske (2002), Martin (2007), and Heil (2003, 2012).
6. For a summary of recent work on irrationality, see Dawes (2002).
7. See Glock (2009) and the essays in Hurley and Nudds (2006).
8. These are, of course, the reactive attitudes introduced in the literature about
free will and moral responsibility by P.F. Strawson in his classic (1962)
paper.
9. While there are important differences between the two, a similar position
is taken by Jonathan Bennett (1964). For a response to Bennett, see Kirk
(1967).
10. For instance, it seems that some non-human primates may have the capacity
for language (at least proto-language). See Arnold and Zuberbühler (2006),
and Conway and Christiansen (2001).
11. It is worth noting that in this respect our understanding better tracks recent
work on concepts in cognitive science. In cognitive science, classical theo-
ries of concepts, according to which concepts have a definitional structure
that expresses necessary and sufficient conditions for a concept, are widely
rejected. See Laurence and Margolis (1999).
12. See Gauker (2011). The Lockean pedigree of this idea will not be lost on some
readers.
13. It may be that understanding mental content as imagistic is more compatible
with connectionist versions of computationalism in cognitive science. If so,
this strikes us as an advantage of the imagistic content hypothesis.
14. Thanks to Roman Altshuler, John Heil, and Sergi Rosell for comments on
earlier versions of this paper.