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Emergence – Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science - MIT Press Scholarship Online
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Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science

Mark A. Bedau and Paul Humphreys

Abstract

Emergence, largely ignored just thirty years ago, has become one of the liveliest areas of research in both philosophy and science. Fueled by advances in complexity theory, artificial life, physics, psychology, sociology, and biology, and by the parallel development of new conceptual tools in philosophy, the idea of emergence offers a way to understand a wide variety of complex phenomena in ways that are intriguingly different from more traditional approaches. This reader collects classic writings on emergence from contemporary philosophy and science. The chapters cover the major approaches to ... More

Keywords: emergence, complexity theory, artificial life, physics, psychology, sociology, biology, philosophy, conceptual tools, complex phenomena

Bibliographic Information

Print publication date: 2008 Print ISBN-13: 9780262026215
Published to MIT Press Scholarship Online: August 2013 DOI:10.7551/mitpress/9780262026215.001.0001

Authors

Affiliations are at time of print publication.

Mark A. Bedau, editor

Paul Humphreys, editor

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Contents

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Front Matter

Title Pages

Preface

Acknowledgments

Sources

Introduction

Mark A. Bedau, and Paul Humphreys

I Philosophical Perspectives on Emergence

Introduction to Philosophical Perspectives on Emergence

Mark A. Bedau, and Paul Humphreys

1 The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism

Brian P. McLaughlin

2 On the Idea of Emergence

Carl Hempel, and Paul Oppenheim

3 Reductionism and the Irreducibility of Consciousness

John Searle

4 Emergence and Supervenience

Brian P. McLaughlin

5 Aggregativity: Reductive Heuristics for Finding Emergence

William C. Wimsatt

6 How Properties Emerge

Paul Humphreys

7 Making Sense of Emergence Jaegwon Kim

Jaegwon Kim

8 Downward Causation and Autonomy in Weak Emergence

Mark A. Bedau

9 Real Patterns

Daniel C. Dennett

II Scientific Perspectives on Emergence

Introduction to Scientific Perspectives on Emergence

Mark A. Bedau, and Paul Humphreys

10 More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science

P. W. Anderson

11 Emergence

Andrew Assad, and Norman H. Packard

12 Sorting and Mixing: Race and Sex

Thomas Schelling

13 Alternative Views of Complexity Herbert Simon

Herbert Simon

14 The Theory of Everything

Robert B. Laughlin, and David Pines

15 Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence

James P. Crutchfield

16 Design, Observation, Surprise! A Test of Emergence

Edmund M. A. Ronald, Moshe Sipper, and Mathieu S. Capcarrère

17 Ansatz for Dynamical Hierarchies

Steen Rasmussen, Nils A. Baas, Bernd Mayer, and Martin Nillson

III Background and Polemics

Introduction to Background and Polemics

Mark A. Bedau, and Paul Humphreys

18 Newtonianism, Reductionism and the Art of Congressional Testimony

Stephen Weinberg

19 Issues in the Logic of Reductive Explanations

Ernest Nagel

20 Chaos

James P. Crutchfield, J. Doyne Farmer, Norman H. Packard, and Robert S. Shaw

21 Undecidability and Intractability in Theoretical Physics

Stephen Wolfram

22 Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis)

Jerry Fodor

23 Supervenience

David Chalmers

24 The Nonreductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation

Jaegwon Kim

End Matter

Annotated Bibliography

About the Authors

Index