Abstract
Starting with the observation that there exist contradictory claims in the literature about the relationship between vitalism and emergentism—be it one of inclusion or, on the contrary, exclusion–, this paper aims at disentangling the vitalism–emergentism knot. To this purpose, after having described a particular form of emergentism, namely Lloyd Morgan’s emergent evolutionism, I develop a conceptual analysis on the basis of a distinction between varieties of monism and pluralism. This analysis allows me to identify and characterize several forms of vitalism and emergentism, and a subsequent comparison between these forms constitutes the occasion for a clarification of the relationship between both doctrines.
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Notes
Quantum mechanics essentially arose from the independent works of Dirac and Schrödinger in 1925 and 1926 while the advent of a physico-chemical biology is the result of a longer process. Some important steps of it are the publication of the “three-man paper” by Timoféeff-Ressovsky et al. in 1935, the famous conferences What is Life? professed by Schrödinger in Cambridge in 1943, and finally the landmark papers of Watson and Crick about the structure of DNA and of Miller about the synthesis of amino acids, both published in 1953.
A concrete example: contrary to what emergentists used to claim (e.g. Morgan 1923, p. 65; Broad 1925, pp. 62-63), the states of water, like liquidity of solidity, have been reductively explained in the light of atomic (and sub-atomic) considerations, and this notably on the basis of the elucidation of the hydrogen bond mainly due to Pauling’s works in the 1930s (Smith 1994).
Classical examples are the relationships between thermodynamical systems and their mechanical constituents or between phenotype and its genotypic basis, relationships that indeed seem to be too complex to fit into the neopositivist recipes for reduction (see respectively Glansdorff and Prigogine 1971; Hull 1972).
I thank an anonyous reviewer of this journal for having pointed out this limitation.
Morgan himself acknowledges this equivalence in the appendix of his Emergent Evolution.
For example, Thomas Henry Huxley—who was by the way Lloyd Morgan’s mentor—raised this very question in his review of Darwin’s Origin of Species published in the London Times in 1860.
For more detail about the way in which emergent evolutionism manages to reconcile a thorough metaphysical determinism with scientific indeterminism, see Sartenaer (2015).
Morgan didn’t actually use the word “emergence” in 1894 but the synonymous expression of “selective synthesis”.
There is no consensus about how to define naturalism (Papineau 1993). Nevertheless, the characterization proposed here captures the two main ideas—self-sufficiency and continuity—that are parts of the “orthodox” view about naturalism that arose essentially in the United States in the beginning of the twentieth century (Sellars, 1927; Dewey et al. 1945). Such naturalism, which is an essential part of the first emergentism, is often conflated with materialism or, more generally, substance monism.
This doesn’t mean that emergence is in itself a causal relation. It isn’t. It is rather a relation of causal combination.
In a more technical jargon, one can say that the first emergentists are committed to a form of causal antireductionism (built on the notion of “downward causation”) that entails representational antireductionism (Sartenaer 2013).
Evocative evidence for this is that the vocabulary of emergence has entered popular science literature as well as textbooks devoted to students in sciences.
I endorse here the widespread assumption that, when it comes to discussing emergence, the declination of monism that is the most relevant is the one according to which the unificatory principle is ultimately physical (whatever the precise sense one can give to such idea).
Namely, predicate monism entails property monism that entails substance monism or, equivalently, substance pluralism entails property pluralism that entails predicate pluralism.
As it has been said in Sect. 1.2, Morgan’s emergent evolutionism and Sellars’ evolutionary naturalism can be considered as being forms of ontological emergentism. For more detail, see Sartenaer 2016. It is noteworthy that materialism is defined here as a particular declination of substance monism, while physicalism is identified with property monism (which entails substance monism). More precisely, materialism is understood here in its “atomistic” sense, namely as the thesis according to which everything is made of elementary bits of matter, whatever these are. Physicalism is rather identified with “realization physicalism” in a materialistic context, that is, the thesis that every property is realized by combinations of physical properties of material objects.
See for example: “It [vitalism] says that living things are alive because they contain an immaterial ingredient—an élan vital […] or an entelechy […]. Vitalism therefore maintains that some objects in the world are not purely physical. According to vitalism, two objects could be physically identical even though one of them is alive while the other is not” (Sober 1993, p. 22). The last sentence of the quotation expresses the idea that vitalism so construed denies the supervenience of the living on the physical.
Such assertion actually captures one of the key ideas of the Biological Principles, namely that the six core biological antitheses—among which figures the opposition between vitalism to mechanism—are part of biology as a knowledge instead of being part of the very nature of biological entities (Nicholson and Gawne 2014).
It must be noted that the word “supervenient” is used here by coincidence as a stylistic variant of emergence, and not in the technical sense the word has today.
Like Morgan himself, when he claims that “since it is pretty sure to be said that to speak of emergent quality of life savours of vitalism, one should […] say that […] it is explicitly rejected under the concept of emergent evolution” (Morgan 1923, p. 12). However, such assertion doesn’t conflict with our claim that Morgan’s emergentism is a form of materialistic vitalism, insofar as the conception of vitalism that Morgan has in mind collapses to what we have called the caricatural view (cf. his words: “if vitalism connotes anything of the nature of Entelechy or Elan […]” (Ibid.)).
This turns out to be consistent with McLaughlin’s (1992) contention that British emergentists were committed to the existence of “configurational forces”, that is, forces operating “over and above” the known physical forces.
It is worth mentioning that, before the 1950s, it was difficult to claim unambiguously that a given thinker was either an organicist or a (common) vitalist or, to put it in the words used in this paper, a “conceptual vitalist” (committed to predicate pluralism) or a “materialistic vitalist” (committed to property pluralism; see Beckner 1967). This difficulty is actually analogous to the one relative to the distinction between epistemological and ontological emergence. Both difficulties certainly come from the fact that, before the analytic turn in western philosophy of science, philosophers didn’t clearly distinguish between concepts and their referents (see for instance Putnam, 1981, p. 207 about Moore’s philosophy). As a consequence, it may be quite delicate to situate some pre-1950s thinkers in the taxonomies provided here.
As a sign of this, it may be noted that Lewes was indeed a great reader of Bernard’s works.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Andrea Gambarotto, Marij van Strien and Charles Wolfe for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, as well as the audience of the workshop Forms of Vitalism held in Ghent, where an early version of this paper have been presented. I also gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS).
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Sartenaer, O. Disentangling the Vitalism–Emergentism Knot. J Gen Philos Sci 49, 73–88 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-017-9361-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-017-9361-4