Workgroup B: Causality and Motivation

Co-ordinator: Roberto Poli, University of Trento and Mitteleuropa Foundation, Bolzano

The belief is widely held that the physical world is causally-driven. The world is one because a tangled web of causally-driven processes keeps it together. The actual world is the way it is, because it is the causally-driven outcome of its previous states. However, both the psychological and the social worlds cannot be articulated in causal terms only. Hereby, “motivation” is used as the most general term referring to whatever keeps (synchronically) together and provides (diachronic) reasons explaining the behavior of psychological and social systems. Biology does not fit easily with either picture. Organisms are part and parcel of nature but they cannot be reduced to a complex web of physical causes, causes that can merely explain the “mechanical” side of such organisms. No serious scholars deny that organisms contain and are based on many mechanisms. However, it cannot be argued that organisms are nothing else than (collections of) mechanisms. Something more is needed. At the same time, motivation does not work for organisms. Again, something else is needed.

This section of the project will address basic category issues. The aim is to sketch at least some fragment of the conceptual framework needed for understanding the various types of realities populating the world and their interrelations and will pave the way for acknowledging types of realities so far excluded from the realm of scientific entities.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Levels of reality (the material, the psychological and the social realms); their interconnections and their internal organization (the connection between physics and chemistry within the material stratum is different from the connection between art and politics within the social stratum);
• Emergence, supervenience, complexity;
• Forms of causality (the classical billiard-ball form of causality is understood as only one of many different types of causation; network and field-like types should be considered, together with upward (“emergence”) and downward (from higher to lower levels) types, and many other types as well);
• Types of motivation (taking decisions, building projects, planning, etc.);
• The concepts of person and agent;
• Biological, psychological and social forms of anticipation (“future-driven” behavior as opposed to “past-driven” behavior).

Societies and General Workplan:

The group in its final version is composed of five local societies, as follows:

1. Pontifical Gregorian University
2. University of Aarhus , Dänmark
3. Salesian Pontifical University , Rome
4. Mitteleuropa Foundation, Trento
5. University of Cassino and Pontifical University Sant'Anselmo

Most of the work conducted by these local societies will be rather exploratory, for a number of different reasons:

•  Firstly, each Local Society will primarily work on different areas of research (Action theories for the Gregorian, Social processes for Aarhus, General ontology for Bolzano , etc.).

•  Secondly, the selected areas of research will be addressed from both a philosophical and a theological point of view. For most of the cases, a main leading figure in both fields has been focused (for instance, Blondel for the Gregorian, Whitehead for Aarhus, Stein for Bolzano ).

•  Thirdly, both the connections among the different research fields and those among the chosen leading figures are far from being straightforward.

For these reasons, the project requires structuring on different layers of organization. Topically, three different tasks can be distinguished:

•  The local project individually conducted by each local society, developed according to the methodology and in the form chosen by each Local Society.

•  The elaboration of a conceptual framework able to facilitate the integration among the different research fields mentioned above.

•  The systematic comparison among the leading figures studied by the various Local Societies.

For further information, send, please, an email to
Roberto Poli, roberto.poli@soc.unitn.it