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Paper short abstract

Recent zoological and philosophical thought suggests the problem of comprehending and representing other animals’ agency is due to human cognitive biases, an issue addressed here by drawing on sensory-perceptual systems in ecological psychology, enactivist literary theory and science fiction.

Paper long abstract

Recent zoological and philosophical thought suggests there is a problem of misrecognition in comprehending and representing other animals’ agency, which is due to human cognitive biases (de Waal 2017; Meier 2019). This paper draws on ecological psychology, enactivist literary theory and science fiction (SF), in order to develop approaches for addressing this through understandings of sensory-perceptual cognitive systems as embedded in and inseparable from their environments. Namely, that other animals’ differing perceptual systems have co-evolved in and through the affordances of their environments (Gibson 1966, 1979); which can be applied to analysing the simulation of lifeworlds in fiction through cultural and sensorial cues (Kukkonen 2019) that enactively produce somatic empathic responses in readers (Caracciolo and Kukkonen 2021); lifeworld simulation techniques that are both deployed and inverted through SF’s cognitive estrangement and alien animals or animal aliens.

It will make its argument using examples of octopus-based (octopoid) figures from contemporary science fiction. In examining the culturally and sensorially simulated lifeworlds of octopoid characters such as Octavia Butler’s faceless multi-sensory tentacled Oankali (2000), Karen Traviss’ unknowable Bezeri (2004-2005), or the anthropogenically-evolved semiotic octopuses of Adrian Tchaikovsky (2020) and Ray Nayler (2022), it speculates on what these reveal about our own naturalcultural cognition while testing a range of posthumanist positions on the question of the animal. In this, it aims to contribute new tools for recognising and ethically representing other animals’ agency in multispecies social science research.

Keywords: Animal studies, cognitive literary theory, ecological psychology, science fiction (SF), posthumanism, octopuses