Technical Artifacts, Engineering Practice, and Emergence
Technical Artifacts, Engineering Practice, and Emergence
This chapter is concerned with the topic of emergent properties of technical artifacts. It suggests that three issues related to the occurrence of emergent features in technical systems are particularly important in engineering practice: emergent causal powers, the tension between emergent features and functional decomposition, and the unexpectedness and/or unpredictability of emergent features. It analyzes the possible effect of weak and strong forms of epistemic emergence for the control paradigm. This chapter argues that it is a mistake to assume that weak epistemic emergence implies unexpectedness and on that ground poses a threat to the control paradigm.
Keywords: emergent properties, technical artifacts, engineering practice, causal powers, functional decomposition, epistemic emergence, control paradigm
MIT Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
