Abstract
An emergent higher-level property is ‘nonvacuously weak’ if it is specified both in terms of the manifest and latent powers of its constituents. The manifest powers are always in action, while the latent ones are activated only when lower-level entities interact into a specific configuration. After the exploration on whether the belief in emergentism is justified and possible, I motivate why nonvacuously weak emergence seems to be a valid candidate. Then I argue that this structural variety of emergence is explanatory reducible, but is not ontologically reducible, to its lower-level composing elements. I close by arguing that this could be the variety that secures a consistent hybrid social theory.
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Mascella, R. (2017). Weak Emergentism and Social Systems. In: Maturo, A., Hošková-Mayerová, Š., Soitu, DT., Kacprzyk, J. (eds) Recent Trends in Social Systems: Quantitative Theories and Quantitative Models. Studies in Systems, Decision and Control, vol 66. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40585-8_18
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