Abstract
In this paper, I argue that the account of emergence advanced by Broad (The mind and its place in nature, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, (1925) is both defensible (in the sense that it provides a coherent and non-mysterious view that does what we want a theory of emergence to do) and applicable to some examples of group-level (or social) phenomena. Specifically, Broad’s account enables the formulation of a non-reductive physicalism (in philosophy of mind) or of a non-reductive individualism (in philosophy of social science), and correctly describes the case of group-judgment under the conditions of the discursive dilemma. Furthermore, this analysis shows that emergent phenomena need not be characterised using the resources of complexity theory.
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Notes
Although, interestingly, Mill does seem to hold something analogous to the non-reductive physicalist, or emergentist, view with regard to the inter-level relations between biology and chemistry and between chemistry and physics; for example, he regards vital phenomena as “heteropathic” effects of chemical causes, which violate the law of the Composition of Causes (see McLaughlin 1992, pp. 59–65).
It is worth noting that, of Davidson’s three references to the concept of supervenience here, the first is for properties, the second is for events and the third is for objects. It is unclear from Davidson’s somewhat elliptical comment whether he intends this three-fold distinction to do any philosophical work, so in what follows, I shall ignore it.
For those au fait with the literature in philosophy of mind, we might characterise (S1) as a “No zombies” clause, since it requires that physical duplicates will also be mental duplicates, and (S2) as a “No ghosts” clause, since it requires that mental events cannot be free-floating; they are somehow “anchored” in physical changes.
Note that the physicalism (or individualism) that I have in mind here really is just an ontological physicalism. It’s a two-fold matter of controversy about whether (a) this is the correct way to formulate “physicalism” in general, and (b) whether, therefore, “non-reductive physicalism” (and its emergentist variant) is in fact committed to a kind of property or conceptual dualism. Chalmers (2006, p. 246), for example, claims that strong emergence “can be used to reject the physicalist picture of the world as fundamentally incomplete”, but seems to have in mind a version of physicalism that has both ontological and explanatory requirements. On this view, “non-reductive physicalism” is an oxymoron, and this is why Kim (1999, p. 5) describes it as an “inherently unstable halfway house.”
For example, it is somewhat cringeworthy to read Broad (1925, p. 63) asserting, just a few short years before the formulation of the quantum mechanical explanation of chemical bonding, that “Nothing that we know about Hydrogen itself or in its combinations with anything but Oxygen would give us the least reason to expect that it would combine with Oxygen at all. And most of the chemical properties of water have no known connexion, either quantitative or qualitative, with those of Oxygen and Hydrogen. Here we have a clear instance where, so far as we can tell, the properties of a whole composed of two constituents could not have been predicted from a knowledge of the properties of those constituents…”.
Of course, the discovery of laws (in physics, for example) is very often experimental. What’s significant here is that Broad’s trans-ordinal laws can only (his italics) be discovered experimentally.
It’s important to note that Broad appears only to think of trans-ordinal laws either as biconditionals, or as statements of co-variation; he does not describe them as identity statements since the latter would render the discussion of dependence/supervenience superfluous, and would also make them explanatory in a way that would permit deducibility and thereby violate (B2).
The relevant article states “The decision of the majority of the judges of the Supreme Court shall, for the purposes of this Article, be the decision of the Court and shall be pronounced by such one of those judges as the Court shall direct, and no other opinion, whether assenting or dissenting, shall be pronounced nor shall the existence of any such other opinion be disclosed”.
The “solution” to the discursive dilemma as found in the Irish Constitution is, of course, not the only game in town. Ireland might equally have adopted a constitution that stipulated a premise-driven aggregation procedure; the judges would still count as judges at least in the sense that they would be asked to determine whether the defendant really had performed the action, and whether the contract really did forbid it.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to audiences in Dublin, Cork and Cambridge for comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and especially to Tom Fitzsimons, Yakir Levin, Cathal O’Madagain, Robert Parker, David Papineau and two anonymous referees.
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Walmsley, J. Emergence, group judgment and the discursive dilemma. Mind Soc 14, 185–201 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-015-0170-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-015-0170-3