Emergence in sociology: Contemporary philosophy of mind and some implications for sociological theory

American Journal of Sociology

Volumn 10, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 551-585

  Sawyer, R Keith ^a  

^a WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0035511375     PISSN: 00029602     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/338780     Document Type: Article

References (132)

1. Alexander, Jeffrey C., Bernhard Giesen, Richard Münch, and Neil J. Smelser, eds. 1987. The Micro-Macro Link. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
2. Andersen, Peter Bøgh, Claus Emmeche, Niels Ole Finnemann, and Peder Voetmann Christiansen, eds. 2000. Downward Causation: Minds, Bodies and Matter. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.
3. Archer, Margaret S. 1979. Social Origins of Educational Systems. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage.
4. -. 1982. "Morphogenesis versus Structuration: On Combining Structure and Action." British Journal of Sociology 33:455-83.
5. -. 1988. Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory. New York: Cambridge.
6. -. 1995. Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. New York: Cambridge University Press.
7. Axelrod, Robert. 1995. "A Model of the Emergence of New Political Actors." Pp. 19-39 in Artificial Societies: The Computer Simulation of Social Life, edited by Nigel Gilbert and Rosaria Conte. London: University College London Press.
8. -. 1997. The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
9. Baas, Nils A. 1994. "Emergence, Hierarchies, and Hyperstructures." Pp. 515-37 in Artificial Life III, edited by Christopher G. Langten. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.
10. Bechtel, William, and Robert C. Richardson. 1993. Discovering Complexity: Decomposition and Localization as Strategies in Scientific Research. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
11. Beckermann, Ansgar, Hans Flohr, and Jaegwon Kim, eds. 1992. Emergence or Reduction? Essays on the Prospects of Nonreductive Physicalism. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
12. Bhargava, Rajeev. 1992. Individualism in Social Science. New York: Oxford University Press.
13. Bhaskar, Roy. (1975) 1997. A Realist Theory of Science. New York: Verso Classics.
14. -. (1979) 1998. The Possibility of Naturalism. New York: Routledge.
15. -. 1982. "Emergence, Explanation, and Emancipation." Pp. 275-310 in Explaining Human Behavior: Consciousness, Human Action and Social Structure, edited by Paul F. Secord. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage.
16. Blain, Robert R. 1971. "On Homan's Psychological Reductionism." Sociological Inquiry 41:3-25.
17. Blau, Peter M. 1955. The Dynamics of Bureaucracy: A Study of Interpersonal Relations in Two Government Agencies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
18. -. 1964. Exchange and Power in Social Life. New York: Wiley.
19. -. 1970. Comment. Pp. 329-43 in Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences, edited by Robert Borger and Frank Cioffi. New York. Cambridge University Press.
20. -. 1977. "A Macrosociological Theory of Social Structure." American Journal of Sociology 83:26-54.
21. -. 1981. "Introduction: Diverse Views of Social Structure and Their Common Denominator." Pp. 1-23 in Continuity in Structural Inquiry, edited by Peter M. Blau and Robert K. Merton. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage.
22. -. 1987. "Microprocess and Macrostructure." Pp. 83-100 in Social Exchange Theory, edited by Karen S. Cook. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage
23. Broad, C. D. 1925. The Mind and Its Place in Nature. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
24. Brodbeck, May. (1958) 1968. "Methodological Individualisms: Definition and Reduction." Pp. 280-303 in Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, edited by May Brodbeck. New York: Macmillan.
25. Brooks, Rodney A., and Pattie Maes, eds. 1994. Artificial Life IV, Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
26. Buckley, Walter. 1967. Sociology and Modern Systems Theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
27. Bunge, M. 1977. "Commentary: Emergence and the Mind." Neuroscience 2:501-9.
28. Clark, Andy. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
29. Clarke, R. 1999. "Nonreductive Physicalism and the Causal Powers of the Mental." Erkenntnis 51:295-322.
30. Cohen, Ira J. 1989. Structuration Theory: Anthony Giddens and the Constitution of Social Life. New York: St. Martin's Press.
31. Coleman, James S. 1986. "Social Theory, Social Research, and a Theory of Action." American Journal of Sociology 91:1309-35.
32. -. 1987. "Microfoundations and Macrosocial Behavior." Pp. 153-73 in The Micro-Macro Link, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, Richard Münch, and Neil J. Smelser. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
33. -. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
34. Collier, Andrew. 1989. Scientific Realism and Socialist Thought. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner.
35. Collins, Randall. 1981. "On the Microfoundations of Macrosociology." American Journal of Sociology 86:984-1014.
36. Conte, Rosaria, Bruce Edmonds, Scott Moss, and R. Keith Sawyer. 2001. "Sociology and Social Theory in Agent-Based Social Simulation: A Symposium." Journal of Computational and Mathematical Organizational Theory 7:183-205.
37. Cottrell, Alan. 1978. "Emergent Properties of Complex Systems." Pp. 129-35 in The Encyclopaedia of Ignorance: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Unknown, edited by Ronald Duncan and Miranda Weston-Smith. New York: Pocket Books.
38. Currie, Gregory. 1984. "Individualism and Global Supervenience." British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 35:345-58.
39. Darley, Vince. 1994. "Emergent Phenomena and Complexity." Pp. 411-16 in Artificial Life IV, Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, edited by Rodney A. Brooks and Pattie Maes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
40. Davidson, Donald. 1970. "Mental Events." Pp. 79-101 in Experience and Theory, edited by Lawrence Foster and J. W. Swanson. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
41. -. 1993. "Thinking Causes." Pp. 3-17 in Mental Causation, edited by John Heil and Alfred Mele. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
42. Duranti, Alessandro, and Charles Goodwin, eds. 1992. Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. New York: Cambridge University Press.
43. Durkheim, Èmile. (1895) 1964. The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: Free Press.
44. Edel, Abraham. 1959. "The Concept of Levels in Social Theory." Pp. 167-95 in Symposium on Social Theory, edited by Lllewellyn Gross. Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson.
45. Elster, Jon. 1985. Making Sense of Marx. New York: Cambridge University Press.
46. -. 1989. Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press.
47. Emerson, Richard M. 1972. "Exchange Theory." Pp. 38-87 in Sociological Theories in Progress, vol. 2. Edited by J. Berger, Jr., M. Zelditch, and B. Anderson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
48. Epstein, Joshua M., and Robert Axtell. 1996. Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
49. Fodor, Jerry A. 1974. "Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis)." Synthese 28:97-115.
50. -. 1989. "Making Mind Matter More." Philosophical Topics 17:59-79
51. Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
52. Gilbert, Nigel, and Rosaria Conte, eds. 1995. Artificial Societies: The Computer Simulation of Social Life. London: UCL Press.
53. Hayek, F. A. von. 1942. "Scientism and the Study of Society, part 1." Economica 9: 267-91.
54. -. 1943. "Scientism and the Study of Society, part 2." Economica 10:34-63.
55. -. 1944. "Scientism and the Study of Society, part 3." Economica 11:27-37.
56. Heil, John. 1998. "Supervenience Deconstructed." European Journal of Philosophy 6: 146-55.
57. -. 1999. "Multiple Realizability." American Philosophical Quarterly 36:189-208.
58. Heil, John, and Alfred Mele, eds. 1993. Mental Causation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
59. Hempel, Carl G. 1965. Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science. New York: Free Press.
60. Holland, John H. 1995. Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.
61. Homans, George C. 1941. English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
62. -. 1950. The Human Group. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
63. -. 1958. "Social Behavior as Exchange." American Journal of Sociology 65: 597-606.
64. -. 1961. Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
65. -. 1964a. Commentary. Sociological Inquiry 34:221-31.
66. -. 1964b. "Contemporary Theory in Sociology." Pp. 951-77 in Handbook of Modern Sociology, edited by Robert E. L. Harris. Chicago: Rand McNally.
67. Horgan, Terence. 1989. "Mental Quasation." Philosophical Perspectives 3:47-76.
68. -. 1993. "From Supervenience to Superdupervenience: Meeting the Demands of a Material World." Mind 102:555-86.
69. Huber, Joan. 1991. Macro-Micro Linkages in Sociology. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage.
70. Humphreys, Paul. 1997. "How Properties Emerge." Philosophy of Science 64:1-17.
71. Humphreys, Paul, Fritz Rohrlich, Alex Rosenberg, and William C. Wimsatt. 1997. "Symposium: Emergence and Supervenience: Alternatives to Unity by Reduction." Philosophy of Science 64:S337-S384.
72. Jackson, Frank, and Philip Pettit. 1992. "Structural Explanation in Social Theory." Pp. 97-131 in Reduction, Explanation, and Realism, edited by Kathleen Lennon and David Charles. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
73. Kauffman, Stuart. 1995. At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. New York: Oxford.
74. Keat, Russell, and John Urry. (1975) 1982. Social Theory as Science. London: Routledge.
75. Kim, Jaegwon. 1984. "Epiphenomenal and Supervenient Causation." Midwest Studies in Philosophy 9:257-70.
76. -. 1992. "'Downward Causation' in Emergentism and Nonreductive Physicalism." Pp. 119-38 in Emergence or Reduction? Essays on the Prospects of Nonreductive Physicalism, edited by Ansgar Beckermann, Hans Flohr, and Jaegwon Kim. New York: Walter de Gruyter.
77. -. 1993a "The Non-Reductivist's Troubles with Mental Causation." Pp. 189-210 in Mental Causation, edited by John Heil and Alfred Mele. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
78. -. 1993b. Supervenience and Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press.
79. Kincaid, Harold. 1997. Individualism and the Unity of Science. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
80. King, Anthony. 1999. "The Impossibility of Naturalism: The Antinomies of Bhaskar's Realism." Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 29:267-88.
81. Knorr-Cetina, K., and A. V. Cicourel, eds. 1981. Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
82. Kontopoulos, Kyriakos M. 1993. The Logics of Social Structure. New York: Cambridge University Press.
83. Langton, Christopher G., ed. 1994. Artificial Life III: Proceedings Volume XVII, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.
84. Lawson, Tony. 1997. Economics and Reality. London: Routledge.
85. Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and Herbert Menzel. 1969. "On the Relation between Individual and Collective Properties." In A Sociological Reader on Complex Organizations, edited by Amitai Etzioni. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
86. Lewes, George Henry. 1875. Problems of Life and Mind, ser. 1, vol. 2. London: Trubner.
87. Liska, Allen E. 1990. "The Significance of Aggregate Dependent Variables and Contextual Independent Variables for Linking Macro and Micro Theories." Social Psychology Quarterly 53:292-301.
88. Lowe, E. J. 1993. "The Causal Autonomy of the Mental." Mind 102:629-44.
89. Macdonald, Graham, and Philip Pettit. 1981. Semantics and Social Science. London: Routledge.
90. Margolis, Joseph. 1986. "Emergence." Philosophical Forum 17:271-95.
91. McLaughlin, Brian P. 1992. "The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism." Pp. 49-93 in Emergence or Reduction? Essays on the Prospects of Nonreductive Physicalism, edited by Ansgar Beckermann, Hans Flohr, and Jaegwon Kim. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
92. Mellor, D. H. 1982. "The Reduction of Society." Philosophy 57:51-75.
93. Menger, Carl. (1883) 1963. Problems of Economics and Sociology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
94. Mihata, Kevin. 1997. "The Persistence of 'Emergence.'" Pp. 30-38 in Chaos, Complexity, and Sociology: Myths, Models, and Theories, edited by Raymond A. Eve, Sara Horsfall, and Mary E. Lee. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.
95. Mill, John Stuart. 1843. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and the Methods of Scientific Investigation. London: J. W. Parker.
96. Morgan, C. Lloyd. 1923. Emergent Evolution. London: Williams & Norgate.
97. Münch, Richard, and Neil J. Smelser. 1987. "Relating the Micro and Macro." Pp. 356-87 in The Micro-Macro Link, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, Richard Münch, and Neil J. Smelser. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
98. O'Neill, John, ed. 1973. Modes of Individualism and Collectivism. New York: St. Martin's Press.
99. Parsons, Talcott. (1937) 1949. The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press.
100. -. 1951. The Social System. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.
101. Parsons, Talcott, and Edward A. Shils. 1951. "Values, Motives, and Systems of Action." Pp. 47-275 in Toward a General Theory of Action, edited by Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
102. Pettit, Philip. 1993. The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford.
103. Phillips, D. C. 1976. Holistic Thought in Social Science. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
104. Popper, Karl R. 1962. Conjectures and Refutations. New York: Basic Books.
105. Porpora, Douglas V. 1993. "Cultural Rules and Material Relations." Sociological Theory 11:212-29.
106. Rawls, Anne Warfield. 1990. "Emergent Sociality: A Dialectic of Commitment and Order." Symbolic Interaction 13:63-82.
107. Ritzer, George. 2000. Modern Sociological Theory. Boston: McGraw Hill.
108. Rosenberg, Alex. 1997. "Reductionism Redux: Computing the Embryo." Biology and Philosophy 12:445-70.
109. Sawyer, R. Keith. 1999. "The Emergence of Creativity." Philosophical Psychology 12: 447-69.
110. -. 2001a. "Artificial Societies: Multi Agent Systems and the Micro-Macro Link in Sociological Theory." Manuscript. Washington University.
111. -. 2001b. Creating Conversations: Improvisation in Everyday Discourse. Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press.
112. -. In press a. "Emergence in Psychology: Lessons from the History of Nonreductionist Science." Human Development.
113. -. In press b. "Nonreductive Individualism." Pt. 1: "Supervenience and Wild Disjunction." Philosophy of the Social Sciences.
114. -. In press c. "Nonreductive Individualism." Pt. 2: "Social Causation." Philosophy of the Social Sciences.
115. Schelling, Thomas C. 1971. "Dynamic Models of Segregation." Journal of Mathematical Sociology 1:143-86.
116. Simon, Herbert A. 1969. "The Architecture of Complexity." Pp. 192-229 in The Sciences of the Artificial, by Herbert A. Simon. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
117. Smith, Thomas S. 1997. "Nonlinear Dynamics and the Micro-Macro Bridge." Pp. 52-63 in Chaos, Complexity, and Sociology: Myths, Models, and Theories, edited by Raymond A. Eve, Sara Horsfall, and Mary E. Lee. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.
118. Steels, Luc. 1997. "The Synthetic Modeling of Language Origins." Evolution of Communication Journal 1:1-34.
119. Suchting, Wal. 1992. "Reflections upon Roy Bhaskar's 'Critical Realism.'" Radical Philosophy 61:23-31.
120. Sztompka, Piotr. 1991. Society in Action: The Theory of Social Becoming. Chicago: University of Chicago.
121. Teller, Paul. 1992. "A Contemporary Look at Emergence." Pp. 139-53 in Emergence or Reduction? Essays on the Prospects of Nonreductive Physicalism, edited by Ansgar Beckermann, Hans Flohr, and Jaegwon Rim. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
122. Varela, Charles R., and Rom Harré. 1996. "Conflicting Varieties of Realism: Causal Powers and the Problems of Social Structure." Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 26:313-25.
123. Wallace, Walter L. 1969. Sociological Theory: An Introduction. Chicago: Aldine.
124. Watkins, J. W. N. 1955. "Methodological Individualism: A Reply." Philosophy of Science 22:58-62.
125. -. 1957. "Historical Explanation in the Social Sciences." British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 8:104-17.
126. Wheeler, William Morton. 1928. Emergent Evolution and the Development of Societies. New York: Norton.
127. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1926. Science and the Modern World. New York: Macmillan.
128. Whitmeyer, Joseph M. 1994. "Why Actor Models Are Integral to Structural Analysis." Sociological Theory 12:153-65.
129. Wimsatt, William C. 1986. "Forms of Aggregativity." Pp. 259-91 in Human Nature and Natural Knowledge, edited by Alan Donagan, Anthony N. Perovich Jr., and Michael V. Wedin. Dordrecht: D. Riedel.
130. -. 1997. "Aggregativity: Reductive Heuristics for Finding Emergence." Philosophy of Science 64 (proceedings): 372-84.
131. Wisdom, J. O. 1970. "Situational Individualism and the Emergent Group-properties." Pp. 271-311 in Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences, edited by Robert Borger and Frank Cioffi. New York: Cambridge University Press.
132. Yablo, Stephen. 1992. "Mental Causation." Philosophical Review 101:245-79.