Juan Mendoza-Collazos

Malafouris (2013) proposes that agency is an emergent product of the relational ontology of our material engagement. In contrast, I suggest a distinction between meaning and agency for a better understanding of our relational ontology with things. Meaning is the payoff of the relational ontology, meaning emerges when an agent act within the world. Agency is the capability to act, signify, produce and obtain meaning, and this capability is exclusive of living organisms. The distinction does not imply to fall in Cartesianism. Agentive semiotics (Niño 2015; Mendoza-Collazos 2016), for instance, is far from an anthropocentric or Cartesian conception of the way the agency operates. The treatment that agentive semiotics proposes for the exclusiveness of agency in living organisms could enhance the force of Malafouris' relational approach, explaining the key role of material culture without methodological fetishism.

Following the levels of intentionality and semiosis distinguished by the Semiotic Hierarchy, and the distinction between original agency and enhanced agency, we propose a model of an agency hierarchy, consisting of six layers. Consistent with the phenomenological orientation of cognitive semiotics, a central claim is that agency and subjectivity are complementary aspects of intentionality. Hence, there is no agency without at least the minimal sense/feeling of agency. This perspective rules out all artefacts as genuine agents, as well as simple organisms, since it is highly unlikely that e.g. bacteria have any first-person perspective. Using this model, we review and assess recent proposals on the nature of agency from cognitive science, and neuroscience, and draw conclusions on how to incorporate aspects of them within a synthetic cognitive-semiotic framework.

Visual thinking is a systematic way to produce knowledge in design by means of mental imagery, spatial reasoning, and the use of an array of visual representations. Pictorial representations such as sketches are crucial for the activity of designing at the early stage of the creative process. Designers see more information in sketches than was actually drawn. The ability to see more information than is sketched out can be seen as an enhanced visual capacity of human agency. Enhanced agency is the prosthetic incorporation of artifacts to improve the original agentive capacities. The incorporation of artifacts to draw raises some fundamental questions: Is the pencil an extension of the mind? Can we think with our hands? What agentive capacities are increased with the use of the pencil? What is the representational status of sketching? The chapter is structured around these key questions to suggest some answers inspired by the work of Göran Sonesson. Using the notion of enhanced agency and the layered model of agency, I explore the way in which the pencil improves the visual thinking of design. In doing so I found that it is important to maintain the principle of asymmetry in cognitive systems to reconsider relational ontology in favor of ecological relationships.

This chapter proposes a classification of artifacts based on an agentive approach—that is, on the actions performed by human agents rather than on the artifacts' functions or features. The agentive approach adheres to the thesis that cognition is not reduced to brain functions but is coextensive with the capacity to act. If there is action, then there is cognition, and therefore, meaning emerges from an agent's relationship with its environment (enaction). It is argued that the notion of Enhanced Agency—the incorporation of artifacts to enhance the performance of actions—is a distinctive feature of the human species, and that the ability to design artifacts is distinct from the creation of natural objects by other animals. Therefore, the definition of artifact is limited to an object created by human beings for a specific purpose. Consequently, after critically assessing other proposals, the classification of artifacts is addressed under three criteria: according to the type of incorporation; according to the type of engagement; and according to the type of action performed by the agents. This typology allows us to resolve ambivalent categories such as cognitive/pragmatic and to be consistent with the material and embodied commitment of cognition, which constitutes a contribution to the understanding of the essentially enhanced nature of human agency.