Plant cognition after Darwin: historical and epistemological remarks
Subjectivity is about engaging with the world as a self, and having things seem a certain way to you. Plants have less of a you. In some ways, a plant is a they, a they of stems and shoots, with signaling running between them. But that is a simplification, too; a plant is partly a community and partly an individual” (Godfrey-Smith, 2021, ch. 8).
Given these deep disanalogies, one might think the issue is merely terminological. A nominalist solution could be to define different kinds of intelligence and other cognitive powers, perhaps indicating labeled with indices (such as ‘P-intelligence’). However, this merely reformulates the problem and does not modify the epistemological balance between the attribution of non-attribution of cognitive powers to plants.
A first point concerns ethics and law. In the case of animal minds, uncertainty about whether certain animals possess sentience and intentionality is recognized as possibly insurmountable; nevertheless, the possibility that they feel pain and pursue goals has led to proposals to attribute those capacities to them as a matter of ethical caution (Birch, 2024; Sebo, 2025).
A second point concerns different cultural views, such as those of “animist” people, who ascribe spirit or personhood to other animals and sometimes to plants and inorganic beings. These views are gaining increasing attention as sources of ecological thought and criticism of the Western ideas about society, economy and the exploitation of nature (e.g., Albert & Kopenawa, 2020; Harvey, 2006; Krenak, 2022). These perspectives can be connected to Western ecology, as well as to metaphysical views of philosophical traditions, such as Platonic animism or Fechner’s monism (Pecere, 2024a, 2024b, ch. 2; Pecere, 2024b).
These two sources of positive bias carry different weights in animal and plant science. The prospect of animal sentience and rights is strongly motivated by the intensive animal farming and medical research, whereas the idea of plant sentience and rights is usually not tied to regulating human industry. On the other hand, the idea of plant as subjects and sources of spiritual insight – drawn from Indigenous lore and experiences with psychoactive plants – is a lively factor even in science. Gagliano (2018) cites Aboriginal traditions as a source for insights into plant intelligence that predate Darwin. She argues that an “unexpected encounter” between “scientific experience and wisdom of the plants” can be crucial, recounting significant personal experiences. Similarly, Simard (Foreword to Gagliano, 2018) values the wisdom of “indigenous seers” and encounters with “plant-persons” as opportunities for learning.
Returning to Darwin, we can conclude that the epistemological alternative between a reductive view and a speculative view of plant cognition was already outlined in his time. Darwin himself occupied an agnostic position while employing a broad analogical view of behavior and cognitive powers in organisms. A significant difference in contemporary debates – besides the greater volume of empirical data – is the tendency to challenge the standard anthropocentrism of scientific notions, within a broader critique Western anthropocentrism and its ecologically destructive consequences. The epistemic scale may still be balanced, but ethical arguments encourage scientists to take analogies more seriously and even question the validity of the human standard.
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