- 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
Introduction to Background and Polemics
Introduction to Background and Polemics
- Chapter:
- (p.337) Introduction to Background and Polemics
- Source:
- Emergence
- Author(s):
Mark A. Bedau
Paul Humphreys
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
The following chapters aim to provide some classic resources on certain philosophical and scientific assumptions and techniques, such as reduction, supervenience, multiple realization, downwards causation, complexity theory, and chaos. Many of these topics also contain creative contributions to the topics of reduction and emergence, and illustrate the polemics that often surround discussions of emergence. A frequently expressed belief is that, in some sense, physical facts are all the facts that exist and all that need to exist, a belief which lies at the core of the contemporary philosophical position called physicalism. One version of physicalism holds that fundamental physics captures the basic truths about the world and determines everything else in physics as well as in chemistry and in biology.
Keywords: reduction, supervenience, multiple realization, downwards causation, complexity theory, chaos, emergence, polemics, physicalism, fundamental physics
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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
