The SRI Seminar Series welcomes Denis Walsh, professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, and one of the Schwartz Reisman Institute’s eight research leads.
Walsh’s current work focuses on the concept of natural agency, referring to any system that can maintain its viability, react, and innovate by mounting adaptive responses to its conditions. Increasingly, we are recognizing the need to understand natural agency in order to explore concepts of artificial agency in AI.
Talk title
“The normative perspective”
Abstract
This is a speculative excursion into the metaphysics of normativity. I argue that the properties that make norms normative are natural properties. Any account of natural normativity must overcome a battery of longstanding philosophical arguments to the effect that an exhaustive inventory of all the natural facts would require no normative concepts, hence norms are non-natural. I draw on recent perspectivist approaches in the philosophy of science to do so. Perspectivists believe that scientific models or theories are invariably descriptions of the natural world, from a perspective, and that one and the same set of phenomena can be described from multiple perspectives. Perspectives can be opaque to one another in the sense that the phenomena and regularities disclosed by one perspective may be inaccessible from another. Normative phenomena are invisible from our usual scientific perspectives—e.g. the thermodynamic, the mechanical, the biochemical—because they are constitutively perspectival. Normative phenomena arise out of the particular form of interaction between an agent and its setting. Consequently, norms, while wholly natural, are only accessible from the “normative perspective.”
Recommended reading
D.M. Walsh, “Objectcy and Agency: Toward a methodological vitalism.” In Nicholson, D. and J. Dupré (eds.), Everything Flows: Towards a Process Philosophy for Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
About Denis Walsh
Denis Walsh is a philosopher of biology in the Department of Philosophy, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. His main research interests revolve around the interpretation of evolutionary theory, and the nature of scientific explanation. Perhaps uniquely among the natural sciences, biology deploys causal, statistical and teleological explanations. Walsh’s work explores the nature of these explanations and the relation between them. He further investigates the nature of living things, and their place in evolutionary biology. Walsh spent the 2018-19 academic year as a fellow at the Institut d’ Études Avancées, in Paris. His project there was entitled Agency in the Natural World, and now constitutes his principal line of research. He is currently a co-principle investigator on a collaborative project with evolutionary biologists entitled Agency in Living Systems, and a member of the Leadership Team of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto.
About the SRI Seminar Series
The SRI Seminar Series brings together the Schwartz Reisman community and beyond for a robust exchange of ideas that advance scholarship at the intersection of technology and society. Seminars are led by a leading or emerging scholar and feature extensive discussion.
Each week, a featured speaker will present for 45 minutes, followed by 45 minutes of discussion. Registered attendees will be emailed a Zoom link approximately one hour before the event begins. The event will be recorded and posted online.
Denis Walsh