Agents and Agency

Authors Stephen W. Enciso and Nicolas J. Bullot Abstract The ‘right to be known’ has traditionally been interpreted from a human-centric and individualistic perspective unsuitable for resolving the environmental crises of our epoch. Given the political need to raise collective awareness about the inter-connectedness of the human and more-than-human worlds, we establish a dialogue between Indigenous and Western philosophies about the rights of more-than-human entities to be kn

Authors Anina N. Rich, Nicolas J. Bullot First Paragraph Imagine that you are walking down the street when you see an old acquaintance coming towards you. You are able to recognize her face, recall the last time you saw her, and retrieve memories about how you came to know each other. You even recall hearing gossip that she had been less than truthful with a colleague. All of this happens in the blink of an eye, and yet, on closer inspection, you might wonder how it is that y

Author Nicolas J. Bullot Abstract To introduce the issue of the tracking and identification of human agents, I examine the ability of an agent (“a tracker”) to track a human person (“a target”) and distinguish this target from other individuals: The ability to perform person identification . First, I discuss influential mechanistic models of the perceptual recognition of human faces and people ( the face-recognition program ). Such models propose detailed hypotheses about the

Author Nicolas J. Bullot Abstract To explain agent-identification behaviours, universalist theories in the biological and cognitive sciences have posited mental mechanisms thought to be universal to all humans, such as agent detection and face recognition mechanisms. These universalist theories have paid little attention to how particular sociocultural or historical contexts interact with the psychobiological processes of agent-identi-fication. In contrast to universalist the