Although it is best known for its controversial insistence on the capacity of nonhumans to act or participate in systems or networks or both, ANT is also associated with forceful critiques of conventional and critical sociology. Developed by science and technology studies (STS) scholars Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour, the sociologist John Law, and others, it can more technically be described as a "material-semiotic" method. This means that it maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and semiotic (between concepts). It assumes that many relations are both material and semiotic.
Critics including figures such as Langdon Winner maintain that such properties as intentionality fundamentally distinguish humans from animals or from "things" (see Activity Theory).(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93network_theory#cite_note-27) ANT scholars[who?] respond with the following arguments:\
They do not attribute intentionality and similar properties to nonhumans.
Their conception of agency does not presuppose intentionality.
They locate agency neither in human "subjects" nor in non-human "objects", but in heterogeneous associations of humans and nonhumans