Keynote Speakers

Angela Potochnik

Professor of Philosophy, Head of the Philosophy Department, and Director of the Center for Public Engagement with Science at the University of Cincinnati

"Architects of Complexity"

Herbert Simon’s “The Architecture of Complexity” (1962) was enormously influential in establishing levels as a default assumption about organization. Jaegwon Kim’s articulation of levels in his causal exclusion principle and Jerry Fodor’s articulation of a “working hypothesis” about multiple realization helped to ingrain levels in philosophical discussion of causation and explanation, respectively. In this talk, I sketch a view of organization opposed to the framework of levels shared by these thinkers and many others they influenced. However, the view I sketch is also aligned with the animating impulse behind these views that systemic organization is central to our world and to what we know of it through science. We live in an ordered world. But the orderings are various, changeable, and relative to interests.