Nuancing Emergentist Claims: Lessons from Physics

Abstract

From a consideration of emergence in physics, I outline how reformational philosophical concepts such as idionomy, encapsis, and anticipation can help nuance the claims of emergentism, whether within or beyond the discipline of physics. The methodological reductionist project has given physics significant success from Democritus through Newton to Hawking. Other sciences seek to employ, extend, and emulate physics with its theoretical precision and verisimilitudinous mathematical laws. Triumphalistic practitioners in disciplines from biology through psychology to sociology—hoping to position their theories as inexorable consequences of physics, touted for its firm foundation, solid knowledge, and clear vision—are applauded by public spokespersons of thoroughgoing ontological and naturalistic reductionism. Such optimism persists even when the so-called stratified nature of reality is acknowledged, especially if the concept of emergence is brought into view. But in addition to being poorly defined, emergence is used in exactly opposite senses: claims of unproblematic scientific explanation for a multileveled reality and claims of the intractable impossibility of such explanation. Sometimes enlisted in support of the former is the notion that emergence within physics is fully understood. A sober assessment of predictability and critical realism in physics, however, demonstrates that the nature of emergence within physics renders physics incapable of bearing its supposed grand foundational responsibility. Examples in various physics subfields are analyzed, demonstrating common themes and principles. Collective physical phenomena are strikingly characterized by robustness of the ordered macroscopic whole relative to variations in microscopic parts, universality near phase transitions, and symmetry breaking, but most importantly by surprise and incalculability.