[PhilPhys] Next Week: Featured Former Fellow - Michael Tomasello- 10/7 and Annual Lecture Series - Angela Potochnik - 10/10

[Center for Phil Sci]

The Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh
invites you to join us for our upcoming lectures. All lectures will be live
streamed on YouTube at
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg.
Featured Former Fellow –Michael Tomasello
Tuesday, October 7 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm EST

This talk is *online-only*. Follow along via Zoom:
https://pitt.zoom.us/j/96906545761

Title: * Agency and the Organization of Human Experience*


Abstract: In modern cognitive science, humans’ experience of the world is
described and explained independent of their behavioral decision making and
action in it. But in evolution organisms experience the world in just the
ways necessary to do what they need to do. It is difficult to see this
guiding role of agency and action in contemporary humans because most of
their psychological architecture evolved before the human species existed
at all. Moreover, many of the unique features of human psychology derive
from their capacity to form shared agencies (including cultures) with
others and to self-regulate them normatively, processes mostly ignored in
modern cognitive science. Over a century ago, the American pragmatists
focused on evolution, agency, and culture, but they did not have the tools
of modern evolutionary psychology to cash them out in empirical research
and systematic theory. Modern cognitive science, artificial intelligence,
and computational modeling would do well to incorporate this new
evolutionary research and theory into their mostly non-agentive models.

This talk is online-only. Follow along via Zoom:
https://pitt.zoom.us/j/96906545761

Annual Lecture Series  – Angela Potochnik
<https://www.angelapotochnik.com/>Friday, October 10 @ 3:30 pm - 6:00
pm ESTJoin
us in person in room 1008 on the 10th floor of the Cathedral of Learning at
the University of Pittsburgh. This talk will also be streamed through Zoom:
https://pitt.zoom.us/j/94976944388.


*Title:  Causes Don’t Push*


Abstract:  Complex systems research has shown that many systems of
different types and at different scales exhibit similar features. These
include robust behavioral regularities that can be described without
referencing system specifics, variability in how systems accomplish these
regularities, and interdependence among system elements. In this talk, I
will explore implications of these developments for our very concept of
causation. Specifically, I will conjecture that the model of causation as
isolated direct influence, like billiard balls, is deeply misleading. The
association of causation with pushing, inherited from the mechanistic
philosophy that reined in Newton’s day, is reinforced by contemporary
science’s experimental practices and causal modeling techniques. Yet,
consideration of the uses and limitations of these contemporary techniques
supports a different conception of causation, what we might think of as a
causal mesh. The persistence of the conception of causation as pushing
obscures the expansiveness of causal relevance and, as a result, is
virtually inapplicable to the complex systems that comprise our world.



*A reception with light refreshments will follow in The Center on the 11th
floor from 5-6pm.*
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