{"doi":"10.31219/osf.io/evna6","title":"What does it mean to be an Agent?","abstract":"Questions have arisen as to the agent status of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. This article endeavors to build a general framework for reframing what “agent” and “agency” means to a more inclusive approach. This article further demonstrates the issues in current approaches (like the mental or intentional approaches) serving to justify the proposed change. It begins with the theoretical underpinnings of ‘explanations’ and how these functions to build theories. Thereafter a model of agency based on the notion of “purposive action” is built. Purposive action is understood to be agents who utilize features in their environments as affordances which are conducive towards their goals. Furthermore, this article builds a notion of agency and autonomy based on semantic meaning which is an intrinsic feature of complex systems themselves. This framework, along with the methods presented provides for a novel framing of agency and a means to rank agents and agency status.","journal":"OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints)","year":2023,"id":407134,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9587,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":873675,"name":"Meshandren Naidoo","orcid":"0000-0002-8547-0380","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":68,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:21:07.213041Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}