# Perceiving Agency **Abstract:** When we look around the world, some things are inert and others are ‘alive’. What is it to ‘look alive’? An account of animacy perception is crucial, both for a proper understanding of visual experience, and for downstream questions about the epistemology of social cognition. I argue that empirical work on animacy supports the view that animacy is genuinely perceptual. We should construe perception of animacy as perception of agents and perception of behavior. My proposal explains how static and dynamic animacy cues relate, and offers a plausible account of how animacy perception relates to social cognition more broadly. Animacy perception draws perceptual attention to objects that are apt to be well-understood folk psychologically, and in doing so enables us to marshal our folk psychological resources ef iciently. Word Count: 9890 When we look around the world, some objects appear animate, others don’t. This distinction is easy to notice phenomenologically, but harder to make sense of philosophically. I’ll argue on empirical grounds that animacy detection is perceptual. Some objects are visually presented as animate, others are not.2 Then I’ll argue that ‘animacy’ should be understood in terms of agency. Perception of ‘animate motion’ is perception of behavior, and the perception of an animate object is the perception of an agent. We should accept the agency-based view because it explains the functional pro ile of animacy detection. Jointly, these claims entail that we perce **Authors:** [[Mason Westfall]]