Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T11:22:11.567Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Natural Agency: The Case of Bacterial Cognition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2017

FERMÍN C. FULDA
FERMÍN C. FULDA*
Affiliation:
ROTMAN INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY, WESTERN [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

I contrast an ecological account of natural agency with the traditional Cartesian conception using recent research in bacterial cognition and cellular decision making as a test case. I argue that the Cartesian conception—namely, the view that agency presupposes cognition—generates a dilemma between mechanism, the view that bacteria are mere automata, and intellectualism, the view that they exhibit full-blown cognition. Unicellular organisms, however, occupy a middle ground between these two extremes. On the one hand, their capacities and activities are too adaptive to count as mere machines. On the other hand, they lack the open-ended responsiveness of cognitive agents to rational norms. An ecological conception of agency as the gross behavioral capacity to respond to affordances, I argue, does not presuppose cognition and allows for degrees of agency along a continuum, from the simplest adaptive agents, such as unicellular organisms, to the most sophisticated cognitive agents. Bacteria, I conclude, are adaptive agents, hence not mere automata, but not cognitive agents.

Keywords

agencylifecognitionbacteriamechanismintellectualism
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , Spring 2017 , pp. 69 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alon, U., Surette, M. G., Barkai, N., and Leibler, S.. (1999) ‘Robustness in Bacterial Chemotaxis’. Nature, 97, 168–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aristotle. (1984) The Complete Works of Aristotle. Edited by Barnes, J.. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Balázsi, G., Oudenaarden, A. V., and Collins, J. J.. (2011) ‘Cellular Decision Making and Biological Noise: From Microbes to Mammals’. Cell, 144, 910–25.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baker, M. D., and Stock, J. B.. (2007) ‘Signal Transduction: Networks and Integrated Circuits in Bacterial Cognition’. Current Biology, 17, 1021–24.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barandiaran, X., Di Paolo, E., and Rohde, M.. (2009) ‘Defining Agency: Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry and Spatio-temporality in Action’. Adaptive Behavior, 17, 367–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Batterman, R. (2005) ‘Critical Phenomena and Breaking Drops: Infinite Idealizations in Physics’. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 36, 225–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bedau, M. (1992) ‘Where's the Good in Teleology?’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 52, 781–805.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ben-Jacob, E., Shapira, Y., and Tauber, A. I.. (2006) ‘Seeking the Foundations of Cognition in Bacteria: From Schrödinger's Negative Entropy to Latent Information’. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications, 359, 495–524.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bertanlanffy, L. (1969) General Systems Theory. New York: Braziller.Google Scholar
Boorse, C. (1976) ‘Wright on Functions’. Philosophical Review, 85, 70–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bray, D. (2000) Cell Movements: From Molecules to Motility. New York: Garland Science.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bray, D. (2012) ‘The Cell as a Thermostat: How Much Does It Know?’. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, 736, 193–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brooks, R. (2001) ‘The Relationship between Matter and Life’. Nature, 409, 409–11.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Burge, T. (2010) The Origins of Objectivity. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carruthers, P. (2006) The Architecture of the Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chemero, A. (2003) ‘An Outline of a Theory of Affordances’. Ecological Psychology, 15, 181–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Choi, P. J., Cai, L., Frieda, K., and Xie, S. X.. (2008) ‘A Stochastic Single-molecule Event Triggers Phenotype Switching of a Bacterial Cell’. Science, 322, 442–46.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Davidson, D. (1963) ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’. Journal of Philosophy, 60, 685–700.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, D. (1982) ‘Rational Animals’. Dialectica, 36, 317–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, D. (1999) ‘The Emergence of Thought’. Erkenntnis, 51, 511–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dennett, D. (1971) ‘Intentional Systems’. Journal of Philosophy, 68, 87–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Descartes, R. (1988) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Edited by Cottingham, John, Stoothoff, Robert, and Murdoch, Dugald. 3 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Di Paolo, E. (2005) ‘Autopoiesis, Adaptativity, Teleology, Agency’. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4, 429–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dretske, F. (1980) ‘The Intentionality of Cognitive States’. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 5, 281–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, J. (1986) ‘Why Paramecia Don't Have Mental Representations’. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 10, 3–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fodor, J. (2000) The Mind Doesn't Work that Way. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fulda, F. (2016) ‘Natural Agency: An Ecological Approach’. PhD. diss. University of Toronto.Google Scholar
Gibson, J. J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Gibson, J. J. (1982) Reasons for Realism: Selected Essays of James J. Gibson. Edited by Reed, E. and Jones, R.. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Godfrey-Smith, P. (Forthcoming) ‘Mind, Matter, and Metabolism’. Journal of Philosophy.Google Scholar
Goldenfeld, N., and Kadanoff, L. P.. (1999) ‘Simple Lessons from Complexity’. Science, 284, 87–89.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grene, M., and Depew, D.. (2004) The Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jonas, H. (1966) The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Juarrero, A. (1999) Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirschner, M., Gerhart, J., and Mitchison, T.. (2000) ‘Molecular Vitalism’. Cell, 100, 79–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lennox, J. (2010) ‘ Bios and Explanatory Unity in Aristotle's Biology.’ In Charles, D. (ed.), Definition in Greek Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 329–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Losick, R., and Desplan, C.. (2008) ‘Stochasticity and Cell Fate’. Science, 320, 65–68.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Locke, J. C. (2013) ‘Systems Biology: How Bacteria Choose a Lifestyle’. Nature, 503, 476–77.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lyon, P. (2015) ‘The Cognitive Cell: Bacterial Behavior Reconsidered’. Frontiers in Microbiology, 6, 264.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marcus, G. (2012) ‘Is “Deep Learning” a Revolution in Artificial Intelligence?’. The New Yorker, November 25.Google Scholar
McClintock, B. (1984) ‘The Significance of Responses of the Genome to Challenge’. Science, 226, 792–801.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Moreno, A., and Mossio, M.. (2015) Biological Autonomy: A Philosophical and Theoretical Enquiry. Netherlands: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nagel, E. (1977) ‘Teleology Revisited’. Journal of Philosophy, 84, 261–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nicholson, D. (2013) ‘Organisms ≠ Machines’. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science, 44, 669–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Norman, M., Nathan, D. L., Paulsson, J., and Losick, R.. (2013) ‘Memory and Modularity in Cell-fate Decision-making’. Nature, 503, 482–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Perkins, T. J., and Swain, P. S.. (2009) ‘Strategies for Cellular Decision-making’. Molecular Systems Biology, 5, 1–15.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Reid, C. R., Latty, T., Dussutour, A., and Beekman, M.. (2012) ‘Slime Mould Uses an Externalized Spatial “Memory” to Navigate in Complex Environments’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 109, 17490–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rosenblueth, A., Wiener, N., and Bigelow, J.. (1943) ‘Behavior, Purpose and Teleology’. Philosophy of Science, 10, 18–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapiro, J. A. (2007) ‘Bacteria are Small But Not Stupid: Cognition, Natural Genetic Engineering and Socio-bacteriology’. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical Sciences, 38, 807–19.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sklar, Lawrence. (2015) ‘Philosophy of Statistical Mechanics’. In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/statphys-statmech/.Google Scholar
Sommerhoff, G. (1950) Analytic Biology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sterelny, K. (1990) The Representational Theory of Mind: An Introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Steward, H. (2012) A Metaphysics for Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strevens, M. (2005) ‘How are the Sciences of Complex Systems Possible?’. Philosophy of Science, 72, 531–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tagkopoulos, I., Liu, Y., and Tavazoie, S.. (2008) ‘Predictive Behavior within Microbial Genetic Networks’. Science, 320, 1313–17.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Thompson, E. (2007) Mind in Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
van Duijn, M., Keijzer, F., and Franken, D.. (2006) ‘Principles of Minimal Cognition: Casting Cognition as Sensorimotor Coordination’. Adaptive Behavior, 14, 157–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Velleman, D. (1992) ‘The Guise of the Good’. Nous, 26, 3–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walsh, D. M. (2008) ‘Teleology’. In Ruse, Michael (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 113–36.Google Scholar
Walsh, D. M. (2015) Organisms, Agency, and Evolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar