Animal awareness: A multidimensional mapping of action-perception abilities

Efforts to understand nonhuman cognition – whether in animals or artificial systems – continue to face longstanding conceptual and methodological challenges. Existing approaches often conflate awareness with consciousness, or rely on narrow experimental tasks, making cross-species (let alone cross-system) comparisons difficult and particularly vulnerable to anthropocentric bias. This paper introduces a pragmatic framework of awareness designed to address these limitations. By treating awareness as encompassing a dynamic space of action-perception abilities, the framework allows the investigation into the degree to which various animals interact with their environments, themselves and othersadaptively. Central to this approach is the Pragmatic Principle of Awareness, which anchors evaluation in a system’s observable performance on tasks associated with a set of abilities across several dimensions of awareness. Rather than presupposing internal states, this approach emphasises abilities as dispositional properties that support flexible and coordinated interaction. This reconceptualisation aims to address methodological barriers such as theory-ladenness and underdetermination by supporting an ability-based, empirical investigation of awareness. Though developed with nonhuman animals in mind, the framework is system-neutral and leaves room for future application to artificial systems, offering a common structure for assessing awareness without relying on shared mechanisms or architecture. By grounding evaluation in what systems can do – not what it might feel like for them to do so – this framework offers a flexible and neutral path forward for mapping awareness across arange of animals.