Toward a Metafunctional Theory of Agency: Recursive Triadic Architecture, Agentive Metabinding, and Agentive Worldhood

This preprint develops the Metafunctional Theory of Agency (MTAg), the fourth foundational theory within the Brain Metafunction Framework (BMF). MTAg reframes agency as a problem of enactment organization: how differentiated possibilities, tendencies, capacities, constraints, anticipated consequences, and other enactment-relevant contributions become recursively coordinated so that an organism—and, in the human case, a person—can initiate, withhold, sustain, redirect, or transform engagement. The theory proposes a recursively coupled architecture comprising Afferent Agentive Differentiation (AAD), Metafunctional Agentive Integration centered on agentive metabinding, and Efferent Agentive Enactment (EAE). Their coordinated operation gives rise to a dynamically revisable agentive orientation, while agentive engagement constitutes the integrated achievement of the architecture. When agentive organization becomes phenomenologically expressed, MTAg characterizes its lived dimension as agentive worldhood, organized around actionability, resistance, constraint, efficacy, and transformability. MTAg distinguishes agency from motor output, action selection, executive control, conscious intention, biological regulation alone, and the subjective sense of agency. It accommodates prereflective, skilled, intentional, reflective, normative, and potentially self-governing forms of agency while emphasizing distributed neural, bodily, cognitive, social, and environmental implementation. The theory is explicitly empirically vulnerable: agentive metabinding and the broader MTAg architecture must demonstrate explanatory or predictive value beyond component processes, their additive combination, and generic large-scale integration. Within the BMF, MTAg complements the metafunctional theories of perception, attention, and memory by adding enactment organization to the first tetrad of world disclosure, significance organization, continuity organization, and enactment organization. These metafunctions are treated as distinct but recursively interdependent rather than sequential stages or independent faculties. The paper also examines implications for personal causation, free and self-governing agency, responsibility, diachronic self-formation, personhood, and ontological openness. MTAg does not make an ultimate ontology of the human person a premise of its empirical architecture; within the broader BMF, such questions are reserved for cumulative interdisciplinary analysis and inference to the best explanation.