The next meeting of the Vienna Science Studies Lab will take place on November 28th, 2-4pm at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Klosterneuburg. We will be discussing a paper draft by Prof. Maria Kronfeldner (CEU), abstract below. In order to sign up to participate and receive a copy of the paper, please send an email to this address (olesya.bondarenko@kli.ac.at) with a brief expression of interest. This is necessary in order to keep the circulation of unpublished work in check, and also for planning purposes. We are looking forward to the meeting!

M.Kronfeldner, The parity and plurality of explanatory roles of nature, culture and environment
Within the philosophy of life sciences literature on human nature, it has been claimed that, for any explanatory endeavor regarding human life, one needs nature, culture and environment. They are explanatorily on a par. This paper will, first, introduce the reader to this so-called parity thesis of the interactionist consensus, which stands behind “one-needs-all-of-them” claims. The paper will, second, point at limits of this consensus, with respect to matters of facts explainable thereby. The aim is to show that we do not only have to acknowledge interactionism, and with that parity of explanatory roles of nature, culture and environment. We also need to acknowledge three aspects of a pragmatics of explanation: (1) different notions of causation (and thus of explanatory role), (2) the plurality of explanatory interests and (3) the plurality of explananda (phenomena to be explained) resulting from (2). We need to recognize both the parity and plurality of different explanatory roles of human nature, culture and environment.