Kiverstein & Kirchhoff, Dissolving the Causal-Constitutive Fallacy

The next meeting of the seminar is planned for March, 12th, at 12:00 (CET) (NOTE THIS COULD CHANGE!). Our guest will be Julian KIverstein (and possibly Michael Kirchhoff). We will discuss a draft paper by J. Kiverstein and M. Kirchhoff, Dissolving the Causal-Constitutive Fallacy: Diachronic Constitution and the Metaphysics of the Extended Mind.

The paper abstract:
This paper questions the causal-constitutive fallacy raised against the thesis of the extended mind. It does so by arguing for an inherently temporal view of the constitution relation: diachronic constitution. The notion of constitution, in common with other metaphysical dependence relations such as composition, realisation and grounding, is standardly cast in entirely atemporal terms. We will argue however that temporalising the constitution relation is not as remarkable (nor problematic) as it might initially seem. It is (almost) inevitable, given local interactions between microscale and macroscale states of (coupled) dynamical systems. We primarily focus on the metaphysics of the extended mind in this paper. However, crucially we also show how our account of diachronic constitution has important implications for the metaphysics of dependence relations more generally as well as an emerging literature on inter-level explanations in the mechanistic framework.

The seminar is focused on discussing the papers, in a reading group style. The speaker first introduces the main theses of the paper (for around ten minutes), and then the floor is open for comments. In the online version of the seminar, the questions must be first signaled briefly on the chat to manage the flow of the discussion.

Mail Przemysław Nowakowski (p.nowakowski@ifispan.edu.pl) for the Google Meet link.