Agency, the capacity to act, is fundamental to how we view and treat each other and the world. In contemporary Western society, agency is ascribed to groups of humans while in other historical and modern societies, agency may be extended to non-humans. This extension of agency seems coherent with findings in biology although agency is rarely attributed to biological research subjects. Centuries of data show that even plants (so named for their apparent passivity) act on other organisms and on their environments.
We ask: (1) How comparable or distinct are plant and human agency? (2) How do plants’ interactions shape their agency? We will achieve a deep scientific understanding of these questions by establishing a coherent interdisciplinary framework synthesizing physical, evolutionary, and contextualized definitions of agency and integrating concepts relevant for plants (framework building).
We propose a system of experiments using strong inference to test plant agency within this framework, drawing on empirical reports of plant agent-like traits (framework testing). We will furthermore develop a concept for a public experiment to engage a broad group of people with the investigation of plant agency as an important example of non-human agency (framework implementation). Understanding whether, and in what way, plants are agents will illuminate concepts of non-human agency that are increasingly relevant for environmental policy, and for understanding diverse forms of action and sentience – including group, social, or network agency and inspirations for artificial agency such as machine ‘intelligence’.
This project will deliver a theoretical framework that can be applied broadly and a synthesis of empirical evidence to date, decisive experimental protocols and toolkits for new evidence-gathering, and a concrete proposal for engaging the public in the experimental process. It will thereby redefine how we can understand agency across the tree of life.
