The final part of the triptych (Of Rats and Men) synthesises the entire series, which aims to (1) challenge selected foundational assumptions of traditional philosophical discourse on human and nonhuman minds, (2) demonstrate how the tools of “the pragmatic turn” can deepen our understanding of animal agency, and (3) provide a posteriori support for gradualist categories of moral agency, such as Mark Rowlands’s concept of “the moral subject.” We pursue these goals by exploring the characteristic features of an advanced form of agency. Building on the themes introduced in Of Rats and Men II, we employ the theory of active inference (AIN) to determine how the processes of counterfactual inferencing and self-evidencing foster its emergence. In this context, Jakob Hohwy’s theoretical analysis is juxtaposed with experimental results on rodents, suggesting that the capacity for experiencing self-evidencing at a psychophysical level falls within the scope of the sense of agency (SoA) and may extend beyond our species.
To investigate this phenomenon, we propose an AIN-based interpretation of Antonella Tramacere and Colin Allen’s “temporal binding” experiment. Finally, we position the concept of rats as beings capable of achieving a cognitively sophisticated level of agency within Michael Levin’s “cognitive light cones” framework to illustrate its ontological coherence.
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