ISRF Post Doctoral Research Fellow

Centre for Social Ontology, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

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Dr Kate Forbes-Pitt

Agency and the Technology of the 21^st century

January 2011 – December 2013

Dr Forbes-Pitt’s interdisciplinary contribution to the Morphogenesis project combines theoretical work in philosophy of science, complexity theory and social theory with extensive practical experience in the application of technology.

In addition her book – The Assumption of Agency Theory – published by Routledge on 1st March 2011 contributes the concept of a distinctive non-human agent.

As well as responsibility for the CSO’s web presence, her contribution will include two monographs. The first, Complex Realism, outlines a realist philosophy for complex systems, adding strata to Bhaskar’s realism by defining a connected ontology and related intra-systemic causal structure. She argues that this represents a suitable ontology for many social systems. The second, The Augmentation of Agency,  relates social agency to highly interactive technology (sometimes known as ‘sixth sense’ technology) that will develop the ideas in her first book.  She also plans to write articles on more specific topics including:

• Philosophy for econophysics – this paper argues that a connected ontology is necessary economics and that econophysics needs to move beyond ‘dust bowl’ empiricism and embrace firm metatheory for the dynamical systems upon which it bases its arguments
• Philosophy of virtual worlds – defining virtual objects as real, understanding their merger with objects of the ‘usual world’ and how agency is formed in the face of this merger
• Cyber-morphogenesis – taking the notions of both non-human agency and possible new definitions of agency from the above work in combination with notions of variety and its affects on populations in complexity theory it may be possible to suggest new ways in which social morphogenetic change occurs.