Abstract
Sixteen years after Kim’s seminal paper offering a welcomed analysis of the emergence concept, I propose in this paper a needed extension of Kim’s work that does more justice to the actual diversity of emergentism. Rather than defining emergence as a monolithic third way between reductive physicalism and substance pluralism, and this through a conjunction of supervenience and (functional) irreducibility, I develop a comprehensive taxonomy of the possible varieties of emergence in which each taxon—theoretical, explanatory and causal emergence—is properly identified and defined. This taxonomy has two advantages. First, it is unificatory in the sense that the taxa it contains derive from a common unity principle, which consequently constitutes the very hallmark of emergentism. Second, it can be shown that the emergence taxa it contains are able to meet the challenges that are commonly considered as being the hot topics on the emergentists’ agenda, namely the positivity, the consistency and the triviality/liberality challenges.
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Notes
Initially owing to Bryon Cunningham's eponymous paper (Cunningham 2001).
One can find early traces of this doctrine in Lloyd Morgan's Spencer's Philosophy of Science (1913), in which the author introduced the concept of emergence in literature since it had been originally and somewhat anecdotally coined by George Henry Lewes in 1875. Emergent evolutionism has subsequently been mainly championed through Morgan's Emergent Evolution (1923) and, in a closely related way, Roy Wood Sellars' Evolutionary Naturalism (1922).
Beside the evocative fact that entire journals and popular works are now dedicated to emergence, evidence of this may be found in the fact that emergence has now been introduced into textbooks for students. For example, in a popular biology textbook, emergence is presented as one of the big “themes in the study of life”, even before the key notions of cell, heredity and evolution (see Reece et al. 2010, introduction).
Actually, considering that everything emerges is not a fanciful view invoked here only for the sake of the argument. Classical as well as contemporary emergentists have embraced—and continue to embrace—such a view (see for instance Morgan 1923; Morowitz 2002). It may be noted that one should qualify the assertion “everything is emergent” by saying that everything but the elementary pieces of reality—supposing these exist and whatever their very nature is—and maybe some idealized “pure” aggregates of them is emergent.
Of course no thinker really is—or will admit she is—a proponent of the first trend so presented, insofar as it has been voluntarily caricatured. Nevertheless, as it will be argued later in this paper, some thinkers conceptualize emergence in a way that may be considered empty of content, insofar as their concept is either unstable—if not thoroughly inconsistent—or trivial. Since they are more prone to show their faces, proponents of the second trend are easier to identify. Either they advocate an abandonment of what they consider to be a spooky or kooky notion (Weinberg 1992), or they adopt a less radical deflationary attitude by construing the concept in a less ambitious way, see for instance the notion of “relative emergence” in Malisoff (1939); or Hempel and Oppenheim (1948); the concept of “weak emergence” in Bedau (1997); or emergence as a “visualization constructed in the mind of the observer” in Ronald et al. (1999, 228).
Beginning as early as Lovejoy (1927). More recently, see for instance Stephan (1999a), Van Gulick (2001), Cunningham (2001), Gillett (2002), Deacon (2007), or Bedau (2010). On the model of all these analyses, I focus on the “synchronic” form of emergence in this paper, and leave aside its “diachronic” declination. More on this distinction can be found in Sartenaer (2015).
For an identification of the first two challenges, see for instance Kim (2006) and more recently Garrett (2013). For the triviality/liberality challenge in the two forms described below, see respectively Berenda (1953), Huneman (2008) or Kim (1998, chapter 3) for discussion; and Smart (1981) or Delehanty 2005.
Another possible and connected trouble for emergentism—call it the novelty challenge—is to provide a positive characterization of what assertions like “emergent properties are new properties” are supposed to mean, insofar as novelty is usually defined negatively, either as an epistemic limitation or as an antecedent non-existence.
In this particular ontological context, the consistency challenge often takes the form of what may be called Kim's causal challenge, which consists in giving a coherent account of the causal autonomy of emergent entities (e.g. through downward causation), essentially in the face of causal overdetermination.
For historical analyses of British Emergentism, see Blitz (1992), McLaughlin (1992), Stephan (1992), and Stephan (1999b). For identifications of earlier versions of what may be called “proto-emergentisms”, see for instance Fagot-Largeault (2002) (proto-emergentism in French spiritualism), Malaterre (2007) (proto-emergentism in neo-vitalism), Clayton (2004) (proto-emergentism in Plotinian emanationism), Heinaman (1990), and Caston (1997) (proto-emergentism in Aristotelianism), or Ganeri (2011) (proto-emergentism in Indian philosophy).
For the sake of generality, I speak here of emergent entities in place of properties, laws, processes, or whatever other relata of emergence one would want to consider.
As an attempt to cover different emergentist trends, this sample is voluntarily heteroclite. It includes quotes from a “classical” British emergentist (Alexander), an American proponent of emergent evolutionism (Sellars) and a co-founder of pragmatism who developed an emergentist theory of mind (Dewey).
For example, Van Gulick's “radical emergence” falls short of meeting the continuity thesis, insofar as it implies a lack of bottom-up determination (Van Gulick 2001).
I am not construing here the notion of substance as necessarily referring to something that has an independent existence or that persists through time. Rather I simply consider substances to be property carriers. I also adopt the causal theory of properties and the metaphysical presupposition that, contrary to the thesis of the “infinite descent”, there exists in nature something like a fundamental level populated by elementary objects. I also only consider each form of monism in its materialistic or physicalistic declination, leaving out other options like idealism, mentalism, etc. Finally, I take here “realization” in the broad sense of constitution that can either be compositional or non-compositional, a difference that can be captured by Gillett’s (2003) distinction between “dimensioned” and “flat” realization.
One can vindicate the idea that substance pluralism entails property pluralism through the contrapositive of the identity of indiscernibles—or McTaggart's principle of the dissimilarity of the diverse—stating that two distinct entities must differ from one another by at least one property. Justifying the idea that property pluralism entails predicate pluralism requires the commitment to a minimal form of realism. In a realistic context, it is indeed arguable that heterogenous properties are referred to by distinct predicates or, by contraposition, that co-extensional predicates refer to one and the same property.
Materialism thus defined in its “atomistic” sense, namely as the thesis according to which everything is made of elementary bits of matter, whatever these are. Physicalism is here identified with “realization physicalism” in a materialistic context, i.e. the thesis that every property is realized by combinations of physical properties of material objects.
This may be justified by claiming that (i) Nagelian reductionism entails token physicalism, a view that assumes explanatory reduction (see Fodor 1974, 101) and (i) functionally reducible properties are not necessarily type-identical with their reduction basis, for physical mechanisms in virtue of which laws of the special sciences hold can be “wildly” heterogeneous (see Fodor 1974, 107).
“Non-deductive physicalism” is an evocative expression I borrow from Smart (1981). The superscript R* is meant to refer to functional or explanatory reduction—explanation being considered in a causal or mechanistic (and non-deductive-nomological) sense.
To be rigorous, though it is clear that explanatory and causal emergentisms are at least committed to functional (and more generally explanatory) irreducibility, I have not yet argued that they are also committed to supervenience. This will become clear below.
The pairing of Dup with the continuity requirement and Ddown with the discontinuity requirement is vindicated by the ontological priority—both historical and constitutive—that lower levels have over higher levels, and which emergentists and reductionists alike generally take for granted. In this context, the lowest level (say, micro-physics) is the reference level with regard to which one evaluates ascriptions of continuity or discontinuity. Another justification of the preferred pairing can be made through examples. Cartesian interactionism is a form of dualism committed to the existence of some Ddown but no Dup. By contrast, Reductive materialism is a form of monism committed to the existence of some Dup but no Ddown.
I take for granted here a lesson coming from classic and overtly anti-epiphenomenalist emergentism, namely that emergence is primarily a matter of “making a difference” in the world (see for instance Alexander 1920, 9; Morgan 1923, 16–17; or Sellars 1933, 322). This train of thought is actually still typical of today's emergentism. In this perspective, I leave aside varieties of emergence that would not be associated with a minimal form of high-level determinative potency. Note that it has been shown (see e.g. Kim 1992, 136) that same-level causation necessarily entails downward causation in a context where at least supervenience is assumed. This rules out the possibility for emergentism to constitute a form of pure parallelism. Note also that, as it will become clear below, Ddown is not restricted to classic downward causation.
As it will be explicated below, another way of showing this is to draw one’s attention on the fact that, whereas emergentism*’s Dup is realization—and hence also supervenience—, causal emergentism’s Dup is only brute supervenience, that is, supervenience without realization.
It is noteworthy that supervenience may actually be considered as compatible with some versions of substance pluralism, an example of which is Nida-Rümelin's dualist emergentism (Nida-Rümelin 2007). Nonetheless, more radical forms of substance pluralism that think of substances as capable of an independent existence—on the model of Stahl's dualistic vitalism or Descartes' dualistic interactionism—deny supervenience, insofar as they deny any form—however minimal—of bottom-up determination (see for instance Caston 2000, regarding Driesch's vitalism). In such a context, two materially identical beings could be such that the first is inert while the second is alive, for it is gifted, say, with Stahlian anima.
As a result, every physically realized property is necessarily supervenient on its realizers, but not vice versa (so there can be supervenient but unrealized properties, as it will become clear below). A brief definitional justification: assuming that property P2 is realized in property P1 on a given occasion, so that P1's existence is constitutively sufficient for P2's existence on this occasion, then P2 supervenes on P1, insofar as (i) for each entitiy x having P2, there exists at least one property Pi such that x has Pi, and (ii) when x has Pi, it necessarily has P2. Thesis (i) merely derives from the fact that P1 is a proper candidate for Pi and thesis (ii) derives from (i) and the realization hypothesis.
Since causation cannot be self-reflexive, in the sense that a given event cannot be its own cause and effect, emergent downward causal powers are new powers that cannot in principle be possessed by emergent bases.
Even if it is difficult to have a clear idea of exactly what kind of emergence Sperry tried to put forward in the 1970', it may be argued that his view amounts to something like emergence*. By the way, the fact that emergence* falls short of meeting the consistency challenge (see below) is probably a reason why many thinkers have regularly expressed skepticism about the coherence of Sperry's view (see for instance Smart 1981).
The causal inheritance principle states that “if a second-order property P2 is realized on a given occasion by a first-order property P1 […], then the causal powers of this particular instance of P2 are identical to (or are a subset of) the causal powers of P1 (or of this instance of P1)” (Kim 1998, 54, with modified notations). A qualification: this holds if one conceives of realization—as it is the case here—as token identity. Other possible accounts of realization are not envisioned here. For a comprehensive overview of these, see Baysan (2015).
For textual evidence, see for instance Broad (1925, 67–68) (for supervenience), and Morgan (1923, 16–17) (for downward causation). It should nevertheless be noted that, while it is clear that British emergentists were committed to brute supervenience, it is not obvious that they construed downward causation in the same way as Sperry did latter. It is a matter of exegesis to establish if their idea of macro-determination was not more akin to what I will call below “Sellars-style” downward causation.
While it is certain that British Emergentism dramatically suffered from a lack of empirical support (McLaughlin 1992), it is also clear that the radical bruteness—and thus the absolute inscrutability—of supervenience (and consequently emergence) also played a major role in the movement's fall. Early commentators already considered this move as a “scientific betrayal” (Montague, 1929) or as the “weightiest defect in the entire theory” (Ablowitz 1939, 14).
In a quite similar fashion, proponents of materialistic vitalism (e.g. Bordeu, Ménuret, La Caze, Fouquet or Bichat) may be considered as causal emergentists. While they obviously considered vital properties as causally potent, they also construe them as brutely supervenient on physical properties, as such kind of claim suggests: “To create the universe God endowed matter with gravity, elasticity, affinity, etc., and furthermore one portion received as its share sensibility and contractility” (Bichat 1805, quoted in Bechtel and Richardson 2010, 102). It may also be argued that Aristotle was a causal emergentist in the sense defined here (see Caston 2000).
So this view is actually consistent with British emergentism, considering the following kind of assertion: “[W]hen some new kind of relatedness is supervenient (say at the level of life), the way in which the physical events which are involved run their course is different in virtue of its presence—different from what it would have been if life had been absent […]. The new relations emergent at each higher level guide and sustain the course of events distinctive of that level […]” (Morgan 1923, 16–17). The sketch proposed here also seems to be consistent with Gillett's recent proposal of “conditioned aggregation”, which “allows that component entities, like lower-level realizer properties, only contribute certain powers when aggregating into and composing a certain "whole" such as a realized property. As a result, where we have Conditioned aggregation a realized property instance can be efficacious not by contributing powers itself, but by determining the contributions of powers by other property instances in its own realizers (i.e. its own components). Though composed, such a realized property would still determine the powers of individuals and be efficacious” (Gillett 2010, 33. Italics in the original).
It should be clear in which sense representational and causal emergentisms are said to be respectively committed to causal continuity and discontinuity. I do not consider that there is some causal discontinuity by virtue of the possible co-existence of two different types of causal relation—intra-level efficient causation and inter-level emergent causation—but by virtue of brute gaps in the way that (one type of) causal powers combine. “Causal discontinuity” thus captures the lack of causal inheritance rather than causal eclecticism.
This notion then encompasses the intentional selection of artifacts, the natural selection of organic traits, the “learning” selection of behaviors, the cultural selection of institutions, physico-chemical sorting processes, etc.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Bernard Feltz, Mathieu Guillermin, Philippe Huneman and Matteo Mossio, as well as the editors and two anonymous referees of this journal for helpful comments. I would also like to thank the audience of the Metascience workshop held at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University for its interesting feedback on presentation on this topic. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Fulbright Program, the Belgian American Educational Foundation and the Special Research Fund of the Catholic University of Louvain. Parts of this paper have been written on the occasion of research performed at Columbia University, Paris-1 Panthéon Sorbonne University and the Catholic University of Louvain.
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Sartenaer, O. Sixteen Years Later: Making Sense of Emergence (Again). J Gen Philos Sci 47, 79–103 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-015-9312-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-015-9312-x