An Inter-Enactive Approach to Agency: Participatory Sense-Making, Dynamics, and Sociality * Steve Torrance** stevet@sussex.ac.uk Tom Froese*** t.froese@gmail.com ABSTRACT An inter-enactive approach to agency holds that the behaviour of agents in a social situation unfolds not only according to their individual abilities and goals, but also according to the conditions and constraints imposed by the autonomous dynamics of the interaction process itself. We illustrate this position with examples drawn from phenomenological observations and dynamical systems models. On the basis of these examples we discuss some of the implications of this inter-enactive approach to agency for our understanding of social phenomena in a broader sense, and how the inter- enactive account provided here has to be taken alongside a theory of larger- scale social processes. 1. INTRODUCTION It is now two decades since the emergence of Enactivism as a distinctive approach within Cognitive Science, with the publication of The Embodied * The authors wish to express their gratitude to a number of people for conversations from which they derived great benefit in the writing of this paper. These include Giovanna Colombetti, Stephen Cowley, Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Madeline Drake, Shaun Gallagher, John Stewart; colleagues at the Life and Mind seminars at the University of Sussex; and participants at a workshop on Enaction and Social Cognition, Battle, Sussex, UK, in September 2008. They would also like to acknowledge the support of the EUCognition network, which funded their participation at the above workshop. Froese‟s research is funded by a postdoctoral fellowship of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). ** Centre for Research in Cognitive Science, Department of Informatics – University of Sussex *** Ikegami Laboratory, Department of General Systems Studies – University of Tokyo