Abstract
The concept of behavior is used in a variety of sense both in ordinary language and the behavioral sciences. In its broadest sense, it just refers to what something does. In this sense, a lot of things are capable of behaving; chemicals react, your computer may start behaving strangely after you visited a website with lots of pop-up ads. For behavioral biologists, the concept of behavior is used in a significantly narrower sense. Usually, it refers to an ephemeral and reversible self-caused movement, attributable to the organism acting as a whole (in order to exclude physiological and developmental processes). However, an unequivocal definition of behavior is not established, and many biologists disagree on what it takes for something to be called behavior (Levitis et al. 2009).
The debate around the definition of behavior in biology has, however, been centered the activities of animals. Other organisms, such as plants, fungi, and bacteria are generally left out of the discussion. Are such organisms unable to behave? If so, is there any hope of reaching a definition of behavior which includes all these different kinds of organisms, yet differentiates them from other things, such as car, computers or chemicals? There is also the question of what is at stake. Why do we want to attribute behavioral capacities to plants, fungi or bacteria? In this talk I will address the conceptual difficulties with providing a general definition of behavior in biology which works for both animals and plants. Further, I will argue that in order to take seriously any claims of agency, cognition, or mind in plants, we first need to have established a concept of behavior in which their activities can be properly analyzed.