E-037 SEP EMERG - Emergentism (Thesis 3 Excerpt)

Exact excerpt

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## 1. Introduction
Although debates concerning the reality or precise nature of emergence are largely driven by contemporary scientific theorizing, the basic notion has quite a long history stretching back at least to Aristotle (384–322 BC). On Aristotle’s view, human beings, like other “secondary” substances, arise from a distinctive arrangement of the four material elements. While the mental powers of human beings require and are necessitated by such an arrangement, these powers are distinct from, and downwardly causally efficacious with respect to, any non-mental powers. Furthermore, Aristotle’s form/matter compound conception of material substances is consonant with the standard emergentist stance between substance dualism and reductionism. For detailed discussion, see Caston (1997). Among Peripatetic philosophers, Alexander of Aphrodisias (late 2nd–early 3rd century AD; in _On the Soul_) and Galen (129–c.200; in _On the Elements According to Hippocrates_ and elsewhere) develop distinctive versions of Aristotle’s basic emergentist picture to apply to chemical compounds and other non-living phenomena as well as living beings. (For discussion of several texts, see again Caston 1997: 347–353.)
Aristotle’s philosophy of nature is re-appropriated in the medieval era, first by Persian and Arabic philosophers such as Avicenna/Ibn Sina (980–1037) and then, with the translation of many of Aristotle’s key texts into Latin, by philosophers in the West, including Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). In the Latin West, Aristotelian ideas, once introduced, become pervasive throughout the era. In particular, Aristotle’s matter/form conception of substance and his concomitant rejection of atomism become axiomatic points of departure in theorizing about the nature of particular kinds of bodies and the distinctive kinds of processes associated with them. (On Aquinas, see Pasnau 2001 and Stump 2003, Part II; Pasnau 2011 examines in detail a wide range of views of substance in the post-Aquinas scholastic period.)
The consensus around the Aristotelian philosophy of nature was dismantled by the Scientific Revolution, with Aristotle’s physics being the first casualty. René Descartes advances an austerely mechanistic and reductionist conception of material bodies, and this broad outlook becomes widespread. However, Descartes argues that the human mind or soul is a non-material substance, and so endorses a substantial form of mind-body dualism. For those also accepting the reductionist conception of the physical world, the alternatives to Descartes’ substance dualism are stark: idealism (on which matter is a mere “phenomenon” to be analyzed in terms of sensations, as advocated by George Berkeley) or reductionist materialism, as exemplified by Julien de la Mettrie’s _L’homme Machine_ (_Man the Machine_ , 1747).
This menu of options is rejected in the nineteenth century by the so-called British Emergentists (with Lewes [1875] first using the term “emergence” for the philosophical position). In “On the Composition of Causes” (_A System of Logic_ , 1843: Ch. 6), [John Stuart Mill (see entry)](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mill/) argues that the behavior of living beings involves a failure of aggregativity or linearity of influence among their elements. He proposes an account that distinguishes “homopathic” and “heteropathic” laws and effects involving organized phenomena, maintaining that the latter laws (governing emergent phenomena) supplement without supplanting basic physical laws of more general scope. 
[Samuel Alexander (see entry)](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/alexander/) suggested that life was a “new quality” that emerges from physico-chemical processes and brings with it “special laws of behavior” and which must “be accepted with the ‘natural piety’ of the investigator. It admits no explanation” (1920: vol.2, 46–47). Even so, he insists that he is endorsing “a species of the identity doctrine” (1920: 9), which suggests that he is seeking to articulate a more intimate relationship between levels of the natural world, perhaps very much akin to weak emergence accounts discussed in [section 3](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/#WeakEmer) below.
Finally, British Emergentism reaches its most developed form in [C. D. Broad’s (see entry)](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/broad/) _The Mind and Its Place in Nature_ (1925). Broad uses an epistemological criterion for what he intends to be a metaphysical condition of emergent autonomy: 
> the characteristic properties of the whole R(A, B, C) [where R marks their structural arrangement] cannot, even in theory, be deduced from the most complete knowledge of the properties of A, B, and C in isolation or in other wholes which are not of the form R(A, B, C). (1925: 61) 
He adds that emergent features are “completely determined” by such lower-level features, in that 
> whenever you have a whole composed of these […] elements in certain proportions and relations you have something with the [compound’s] characteristic properties and […] nothing has these properties except a whole composed in this way. (1925: 64) 
Reminiscent of Mill, he distinguishes “intra-ordinal” from emergent “trans-ordinal” laws (1925: 77–8) which, although dealing solely with complex phenomena, are “unique and ultimate” (1925: 64–5). As a consequence:
> On the emergent theory we have to reconcile ourselves to much less unity in the external world and a much less intimate connexion between the various sciences. At best the external world and the various sciences that deal with it will form a kind of hierarchy. (1925: 78)