One of the speakers at The Organic and the Normative conference, taking place between July 30–August 1, 2024 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, is going to be Konrad Werner.

Konrad Werner is a philosopher holding a PhD from Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Currently serving as an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Warsaw, he has also been a research assistant at the Institute of Philosophy, Jagiellonian University. Dr. Werner’s research spans various areas, including philosophy of perception, philosophy of mind (enactivism/embodied cognition), theory of institutions, applied ontology, and meta-philosophy. In 2023, he attained his Habilitation in philosophy from the University of Warsaw, Poland.

Highlighted Article

Werner, K. (2024). Enacted institutions, participatory sense-making and social norms. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04569-0

This paper argues that institutions are higher-level autonomous systems enacted by patterns of participatory sense-making. Therefore, unlike in the standard equilibrium theory, institutions are not themselves thought of as behavioural patterns. Instead, they are problem domains that these patterns have brought forth. Moreover, these are not merely any patterns, but only those devoted to maintaining a specific strategy of problem solving, called the strategy of ‘letting be’. The latter refers to, following Hanne de Jaegher, a balance between underdetermination and overdetermination of individual behaviour by a collective. Such an understanding of institutions becomes an option once a hybrid ‘equilibrium + rules’ theory of institutions, such as the one proposed by Frank Hindriks, is supplemented with insights from enactivism. In this light, drawing a connection between these two areas is the additional, meta-theoretical goal of this paper. This connection is beneficial, I argue, in particular since it allows for a satisfactory, in-depth account of the normative character of institutions as well as their local character.