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Embracing Agency in All of Its Explanatory Complexity

Agency – the topic once deemed illusory and explanatorily vacuous – now commands renewed scholarly attention across the psychological, developmental, and biological sciences (Bandura, 2006; Juarrero, 1999; Martin, Sugarman, & Hickinbottom, 2010; Martin, Sugarman & Thompson, 2003; Moreno & Mossio, 2015; Sugarman & Sokol, 2012; Thompson, 2007; Walsh, 2015; Weber & Varela, 2002). It is a topic, in fact, currently championed by many as foundational to an understanding of all living systems and their activity in the world. And it is a topic central to the book Sensorimotor life: An enactive proposal, published last year by Ezequiel Di Paolo, Thomas Buhrmann, and Xabier Barandiaran. In this essay review, I consider Di Paolo et al.’s (2017) book through the lens of recent trends in agency conceptualization, particularly within developmental science – trends that, as I will argue, hold the potential to foster as much conceptual confusion as they do clarity. By providing this contextual framing, I hope to illuminate the critical significance of Sensorimotor life for dispelling conceptual confusion and advancing the explanatory role of agency in science. In recent years, scholarly accounts have sometimes construed agency as a capacity to self-determine actions in the world (e.g., Frie, 2008; Martin, 2008). But more frequently, and oftentimes in the same breath, these accounts have identified agency with situated actions themselves, relationally constituted in physical and sociocultural context (e.g., Frie, 2008; Martin et al., 2010; Sauvayre, 2008; Sugarman, 2008). Of late, some treatments have gone further by explicitly conceptualizing agency as a process rather than as a capacity, describing it (in the context of humans) as “a multilayered psychosocial process ... distributed not only across ontogenetic time, but also across people and their relationships to each other” (Sokol, Hammond, Kuebli, & Sweetman, 2015, p. 299; Sokol, Müller, & Chandler, 2013). Overall, current trends in agency conceptualization promote a contextual, process-oriented view of agency – a view of agency as an activity of living systems in context, borne of and constituted in relations between living systems and the world in which they are embedded. Such a view speaks to the dynamics both of agency’s developmental construction and of its real-time exercise. And such a view offers a vital corrective to traditional treatments Published online: January 24, 2019