A new problem for ontological emergence

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 56, Issue 222, 2006, Pages 55-62

  Heard, Daniel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949215695     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9213.2005.00428.x     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. A defence of this view is given in M. Silberstein and J. McGeever, 'The Search for Ontological Emergence', The Philosophical Quarterly, 49 (1999), pp. 182-200
2. Epistemological emergence has been defended in a variety of flavours. A fairly characteristic position is outlined in M. Bedau, 'Weak Emergence', in J. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, 11: Mind, Causation, and World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 375-99
3. A. Clark, Being There (MIT Press, 1997), ch. 6, esp. pp. 119-28, focuses on collective variables and the role of dynamical systems theory
4. R. Batterman, The Devil in the Details (Oxford UP, 2002), ch. 8, esp. p. 127, offers an unusual account which stresses the importance of asymptotic relations between theories
5. This traditional tension between ontological emergence and ontological minimalism is noted, for example, by P. Humphreys, 'Emergence, Not Supervenience', Philosophy of Science, 64 (1997), pp. S337-45, at pp. S337-8
6. See, for example, J. Kim, 'Supervenience and Nomological Incommensurables', American Philosophical Quarterly, 15 (1978), pp. 149-56, at p. 154
7. and 'Making Sense of Emergence', Philosophical Studies, 95 (1999), pp. 3-36, at p. 7
8. Ontological emergence applied specifically to human mental states is defended in, for example, T. O'Connor and J. Jacobs, 'Emergent Individuals', The Philosophical Quarterly, 53 (2003), pp. 540-55
9. For discussion of these and many other examples, see R. Albert and A. Barabási, 'Statistical Mechanics of Complex Networks', Reviews of Modern Physics, 74 (2002), pp. 47-97
10. P. Krapivsky, S. Redner and F. Leyvraz, 'Connectivity of Growing Random Networks', Physical Review Letters, 85 (2000), pp. 4629-32
11. These features of scale-free networks are outlined formally in R. Albert, H. Jeong and A. Barabási, 'Error and Attack Tolerance of Complex Networks', Nature, 406 (2000), pp. 378-81