Editorial: Varieties of Agency: Exploring New Avenues

Nivedita Gangopadhyay ^1* Franz Knappik ¹ Vivian Puusepp ²

• ¹ University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
• ² University of Tartu, Tartu, Tartu County, Estonia

The anthropocentric bias that Wong points to here has been a longstanding target of critique in ecofeminist thought. In her contribution, Trächtler (https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1389575) draws on the work of Donna Haraway to challenge widely held basic assumptions about agency, in particular, the tendency to understand the contexts in which human agents find themselves as a mere passive background to their actions. In contrast to this conception, Trächtler explores the theme of the world as a non-human agent, adopting a critical stance on so-called "objective" knowledge of the world, for example as upheld in the natural sciences. The paper presents a nuanced discussion of rethinking scientific objectivity about the world, examining how far one can actually consider the world as an agent in terms of epistemically and politically effective agency. A number of contributions also revisit the theme of 'affordances' that has been a corner-stone in 4E cognition as a concept that establishes an intrinsic connection between the agent and the world. Revisiting varieties of agency leads several authors to revisit the concept of affordances -a concept that connects the agent and the world. Thus, Stankozi (https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1369820 ) takes up the discussions of how the agent chooses between competing affordances and proposes that affordance competition drives the process of imagination, thereby linking discussions of imagination to those of affordances. Hansen (https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1388852 ) proposes a strong perceptual account of affordances to explain the perception of visually indistinguishable objects that belong to categorically distinct high-level kinds. Hansen's account strengthens the notion of affordance perception by applying it to long-standing debates about objects that appear visually indiscernible but differ in their underlying nature, such as a real lemon and a lemon-shaped soap bar. Several contributions directly address core topics from discussions of agency in the framework of 4E cognition, such as situatedness and embodiment. Heijmeskamp (https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1392995 ) explores the issue of how agents react to affordances by focusing on a conceptual discussion of the notion of situation. Heijmeskamp proposes that agents understand actions only in relation to situations, and develops a theoretical account that clarifies the notion of a situation. 'Situation' is also a key topic in debating whether or not artificial entities may one day contend to the title of being agents. Jaeger, Riedl, Djedovic, Vervaeke and Walsh (https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1362658 ) place the debate about organismic agency and algorithms within the discussion of situation and propose that, in contrast to algorithms, organismic agency is fundamentally agentive in that it emerges to solve the problem of what is relevant in a situation. The authors reject the idea that algorithms may lay claim to agency by arguing that discussions of agency should extend to include the context or situation as necessary in understanding what is an agent. They conclude by contending that the fundamental building blocks of cognition and consciousness are only present in natural agency and that artificial algorithmic systems do not possess genuine cognition and agency because they do not have a context in terms of any problem of relevance that they have to solve. The theme of embodiment and its role in agency also emerges as keypoint of discussions. Exploring the social nature of agency, Achour-Benallegue, Pelletier, Kaminski and Kawabata (https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1356237 ) explore the theme of "facial icon" that usually is applied to digital face illustrations, but the authors extend it to cover a broad category of facial representations. They propose that facial icons engage social agency by triggering an embodied simulation that leads to perception of these icons as communicating not only emotions but also intentions. This opens up a new field of interdisciplinary investigation for designing such icons for purposes of social agentive engagement. Gangopadhyay and Pichler (https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1392949 ) explore the topic of humans as embodied agents in a digital world that is increasingly under the influence of technologies built on nonembodied algorithms. They return to long-standing debates between 4E cognition and its critiques and propose that while it may appear that non-embodied cognition views have an explanatory advantage in the context of technologies built on non-embodied algorithms, the real contribution of these technologies to the debates is that digital technologies have great potential to uncover hitherto unexplored aspects of the mind-body continuum. Exploring these aspects has the potential to transform the debates between 4E cognition and non-embodied cognition views by revealing new ways in which digital technology can interact with and shape embodied minds. Thus the Research Topic has engaged scholars from diverse disciplines and diverse perspectives in exploring the theme of agency in an increasingly complex world, especially in view of humanity's role and capacity to make changes for the better. We hope the Topic will encourage further interdisciplinary research that asks critical questions and provides useful answers in the face of global challenges.