- Title Pages
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Sources
- Introduction
- Introduction to Philosophical Perspectives on Emergence
-
1 The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism -
2 On the Idea of Emergence -
3 Reductionism and the Irreducibility of Consciousness -
4 Emergence and Supervenience -
5 Aggregativity: Reductive Heuristics for Finding Emergence -
6 How Properties Emerge -
7 Making Sense of Emergence Jaegwon Kim -
8 Downward Causation and Autonomy in Weak Emergence -
9 Real Patterns - Introduction to Scientific Perspectives on Emergence
-
10 More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science -
11 Emergence -
12 Sorting and Mixing: Race and Sex -
13 Alternative Views of Complexity Herbert Simon -
14 The Theory of Everything -
15 Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence -
16 Design, Observation, Surprise! A Test of Emergence -
17 Ansatz for Dynamical Hierarchies - Introduction to Background and Polemics
-
18 Newtonianism, Reductionism and the Art of Congressional Testimony -
19 Issues in the Logic of Reductive Explanations -
20 Chaos -
21 Undecidability and Intractability in Theoretical Physics -
22 Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis) -
23 Supervenience -
24 The Nonreductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation - Annotated Bibliography
- About the Authors
- Index
More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science
More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science
- Chapter:
- (p.221) 10 More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science
- Source:
- Emergence
- Author(s):
P. W. Anderson
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
This chapter discusses the reductionist hypothesis, which remains a topic of controversy among philosophers, but which, the other hand, the great majority of scientists accept without question. The hypothesis posits that all animate or inanimate matter of which people have detailed knowledge are controlled by a set of fundamental laws of which people also have detailed knowledge. Many find it acceptable, at first, to assume that if everything obeys the same fundamental laws, then studying those laws is fundamental, and the only scientists who are studying anything fundamental are those who are working on those laws. This is the basic and obvious consequence of reductionism. The main fallacy in this kind of thinking is that it does not, by any means, imply a “constructionist” hypothesis. In fact, the more elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of the fundamental laws, the less relevant they become to the real problems of society.
Keywords: reductionist hypothesis, reductionism, fundamental laws, constructionist hypothesis, elementary particle
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- Title Pages
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Sources
- Introduction
- Introduction to Philosophical Perspectives on Emergence
-
1 The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism -
2 On the Idea of Emergence -
3 Reductionism and the Irreducibility of Consciousness -
4 Emergence and Supervenience -
5 Aggregativity: Reductive Heuristics for Finding Emergence -
6 How Properties Emerge -
7 Making Sense of Emergence Jaegwon Kim -
8 Downward Causation and Autonomy in Weak Emergence -
9 Real Patterns - Introduction to Scientific Perspectives on Emergence
-
10 More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science -
11 Emergence -
12 Sorting and Mixing: Race and Sex -
13 Alternative Views of Complexity Herbert Simon -
14 The Theory of Everything -
15 Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence -
16 Design, Observation, Surprise! A Test of Emergence -
17 Ansatz for Dynamical Hierarchies - Introduction to Background and Polemics
-
18 Newtonianism, Reductionism and the Art of Congressional Testimony -
19 Issues in the Logic of Reductive Explanations -
20 Chaos -
21 Undecidability and Intractability in Theoretical Physics -
22 Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis) -
23 Supervenience -
24 The Nonreductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation - Annotated Bibliography
- About the Authors
- Index
