August Faller (University of the Fraser Valley): What’s Done Cannot be Undone: Social Kind Realism without Backwards Causation

Abstract: Philosophers have recently argued that the social world contains examples of people affecting the past, for example by revoking a sports title or by passing a retroactive law. If the cases are genuine, then we would need to significantly revise our understanding of causation and of the immutability of the past. In this talk, I show that the arguments for backwards causation face serious metaphysical challenges, and so we should reject the existence of backwards causation in the social realm. But not all is lost: there is still a strong positive case for social kind realism and the causal efficacy of social properties. We just have less control over social reality than we might have thought.