Primitive Agency and Natural Norms

My main objective in this paper is to rough out a notion of primitive agency. A secondary objective is to connect primitive agency to natural norms, and to make some remarks on how natural norms apply once primitive agency is linked with an agent’s perceptually identified goals. Both of these objectives bear on primitive antecedents of the higherlevel types of agency that we as philosophers tend to be most interested in—intentional agency, norm-guided agency, deliberative agency, morally responsible agency, intellectual agency, and so on. I believe that by setting these higher levels of agency in a broader, more generic framework, we gain insight into them. For present purposes, I will not defend this belief. What I have to say here in action theory is closely connected to parallel but more extensive work that I have done on perception. One of the main points of the work on perception is to distinguish between mere sensory capacities and sensory-perceptual capacities. Broadly speaking, this distinction marks where representational mind begins. The distinction hinges on perception’s having representational content with accuracy conditions and with perception’s involving a certain type of objectification, exhibited paradigmatically in perceptual constancies. Perceptual constancies are capacities systematically to represent a given particular entity or specific property, relation, or kind as the