Making sense of emergence

Philosophical Studies

Volumn 95, Issue 1-2, 1999, Pages 3-36

  Jaegwon, K I M ^a  

^a BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 53149135429     PISSN: 00318116     EISSN: 15730883     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. For helpful historical surveys of emergentism see Brian McLaughlin, "The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism", and Achim Stephan, "Emergence - A Systematic View on Its Historical Facets", both in Emergence or Reduction!, ed. A. Beckermann, H. Flohr, and J. Kim (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1993).
2. In A System of Logic (1843), Bk. III, ch. vi.
3. It appears that Galen (AD 129 - c. 200) had a clear statement of the distinction between emergent and nonemergent properties of wholes; see On the Elements according to Hippocrates, 1.3, 70.15-74.23. I owe this reference to Victor Gaston.
4. See Hempel's "Studies in the Logic of Explanation" (with Paul Oppenheim), reprinted in his Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York: The Free Press, 1965), and Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), ch. 11. It is interesting to note that another early positivist philosopher of science, Karl Popper, became in the final stages of his career a strong defender of emergentism; see John C. Eccles and Karl R. Popper, The Self and Its Brain (Berlin & New York: Springer International, 1977).
5. E.g., John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992); Francisco Varella, Evan Thompson, and Elearnor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).
6. In particular, "The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism", reprinted in Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
7. Some will complain that this picture is inextricably wedded to the now defunct prequantum classical particle physics; that may be, but it is the picture the British emergentists worked with. Moreover, it is an open question, I believe, whether anything of substance would change if the issues were set in a quantum-mechanical framework.
8. Obviously extrinsic/relational/historical properties (e.g., being 50 miles to the south of Boston) must be excluded, and the statement is to be understood to apply only to the intrinsic properties of systems. There is also a tacit assumption that the intrinsic properties of a system determine its causal powers.
9. C. Llyod Morgan, Emergent Evolution (London: Williams and Norgate, 1923), pp. 2-3.
10. What I believe to be more appropriate here is William C. Wimsatt's notion of aggregativity defined in terms of certain invariance conditions; see his "Emergence as Non-Aggregativity and the Biases of Reductionisms" (forthcoming in Natural Contradictions: Perspectives on Ecology and Change, ed. P. J. Taylor and Jrjo Haila). However, I bypass these considerations here in favor of a simpler and more straightforwrad notion of predictability. See also Paul Humphreys' interesting paper, "How Properties Emerge" (forthcoming in Philosophy of Science). I cannot discuss here Humphrey's interesting proposals, but I believe everything of any significance I say here is consistent with his views.
11. Cf. Morgan: "Lewes says that the nature of emergent characters can only be learnt by experience of their occurrence; hence they are unpredictable before the event", Emergent Evolution, p. 5.
12. See, e.g., what Michael Tye calls "perspectival subjectivity", in his Ten Problems of Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). And of course the situation here reminds one of Frank Jackson's much discussed case of the blind superneurophysiologist Mary.
13. As noted by McLaughlin in "The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism".
14. For example, David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 43.
15. The fundamental ideas for this view of reduction are present in David Armstrong's A Materialist Theory of Mind (New York: Humanities Press, 1964), and David Lewis's "An Argument for the identity Theory", Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970): 203-211. However, neither Armstrong nor Lewis, to my knowledge, explicitly associate these ideas directly with models of reduction. The idea of functional analysis of mental terms or properties is of course the heart of the functionalist approach to mentality; it is interesting, therefore, to note that most functionalists have regarded their approach as essentially antireductionist. For similar views on reduction see Robert Van Gulick, "Nonreductive Materialism and the Nature of Intertheoretic Constraint", in Emergence or Reduction ?, ed. A Beckermann, H. Flohr, and J. Kim; Joseph Levine, "On Leaving Out What It Is Like", in Consciousness, ed. Martin Davies and Glyn W. Humphreys (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). See also Chalmers' discussion of "reductive explanation", in The Conscious Mind, ch. 2. I discuss these issues in greater detail in Mind in a Physical World (forthcoming).
16. For brevity we will often speak of a property causing another property - what is meant of course is that an instantiation of a property causes another property to be instantiated.
17. See Lawrence Sklar, Physics and Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
18. See Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961).
19. In "Reduction with Autonomy" (forthcoming in Philosophical Perspectives, 1997) Lousie Antony and Joseph Levine advance interesting arguments against the disjunctive approach.
20. This point is valid whether or not E has single or multiple realizers in the actual world. A property may have a single realizer here but multiple realizers in other worlds, and vice versa.
21. For more details on this approach see my "The Mind-Body Problem: Taking Stock After 40 Years", forthcoming in Philosophical Perspectives, 1997, and Mind in a Physical World (forthcoming).
22. For more details see my "Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction", reprinted in Supervenience and Mind.
23. This point is argued by David Chalmers; see his The Conscious Mind, p. 129.
24. More details and an overview of the philosophical terrain involved, see Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, ch. 3. Two early papers arguing this point are Joseph Levine, "Materialism and Qualia: the Explanatory Gap", Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (1983): 354-61, and Frank Jackson, "Epiphenomenal Qualia", Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982): 127-36.
25. See, e.g., Paul Oppenheim and Hilary Putnam, "Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis", in Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science, vol. 2, ed. Hervert Feigl, Michael Scriven, and Grover Maxwell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958). As the title of the paper suggests, Oppenheim and Putnam advocate a strong physical reductionism, a doctrine that is diametrically opposed to emergentism.
26. For an informative discussion of the issues in this area see William C. Wimsatt, "Reductionism, Levels of Organization, and the Mind-Body Problem", in Consciousness and the Brain, ed. Gordon G. Globus, Grover Maxwell, and Irwin Savodnik (New York & London: Plenum Press, 1976
27. ), and "The Ontology of Complex Systems: Levels of Organization, Perspectives, and Causal Thickets", Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 20 (1994): 207-274.
28. Space, Time, and Deity, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1927), p. 8.
29. As I have argued elsewhere, this holds for certain positions other than emergentism, e.g., the view that higher properties supervene on lower properties, and the view that higher properties are realized by lower properties.
30. I first presented this arguement in '"Downward Causation' in Emergentism and Nonreductive Physicalism", in Emergence or Reduction?
31. Emergent Evolution (London: Williams & Norgate, 1927), pp. 15-16. Emphasis added.
32. "Mental Phenomena as Causal Determinants in Brain Function", in Consciousness and the Brain, ed. Globus, Maxwell, and Savodnik, p. 165.
33. "A Modified Concept of Consciousness", Psychological Review 76 (1969): 532-536.
34. Ibid.
35. This case, therefore, involves the controversial idea of simultaneous causation (where a cause and its effect occur at the same time). However, this is a general metaphysical issue, and in the present context it will be unproductive to focus on this aspect of the situation.
36. I raised this question earlier in '"Downward Causation' in Emergentism and Nonreductive Physicalims", in Emergence or Reduction?
37. The argument can be generalized to the supervenience and realization views of the mind-body relation. For more details see my "The Nonreductivist's Troubles with Mental Causation" (reprinted in Supervenience and Mind) and Mind in a Physical World.
38. See also Timothy O'Connor, "Emergent Properties", American Philosophical Quarterly 31 (1994): 91-104, for an attempt to counter the argument.
39. C. Lloyd Morgan explicitly denies that emergence is a form of causation, in Emergent Evolution, p. 28.
40. Here I must enter some caveats. As the reader may recall, I earlier said that there is no special problem of downward causation, citing such examples as my celadon creashing on the pavement of the sidewalk. Cases like this are not the cases of downward causation that most emergentists have in mind, for like Sperry's example of the flying bird they don't seem to involve genuine "higher-level" properties. In general, complex systems obviously can bring new causal powers into the world, powers that cannot be identified with causal powers of more basic, simpler systems. Among them are the causal powers of microstructural, or micro-based, properties of a complex system. Note that these properties are not themselves emergent properties; rather, they form the basal conditions from which further properties emerge (for example, that consciousness is not itself a microstructural property of an organism, although it may emerge from one). If all this sounds too complicated, you could regard the argument in the text to be restricted to consciousness and other standard examples of emergent properties. For further discussion, see my Mind in a Physical World.
41. This paper is largely based on the following two papers of mine: "Explanation, Prediction, and Reduction in Emergentism", forthcoming in Intellectica, and "Making Sense of Downward Causation", forthcoming in a volume of essays on emergence and downward causation, ed. Peter Boegh Andersen et al.