Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science

by Bedau, Mark A.

• ISBN13: 9780262026215
• ISBN10: 026202621X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-04-01
• Publisher: MIT PRESS

Summary

Emergence, largely ignored just thirty years ago, has become one of the liveliest areas of research in both philosophy and science. Fueled in part 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 for the first time in one easily accessible place classic writings on emergence from contemporary philosophy and science. The chapters, by such prominent scholars as John Searle, Stephen Weinberg, William Wimsatt, Thomas Schelling, Jaegwon Kim, Robert Laughlin, Daniel Dennett, Herbert Simon, Stephen Wolfram, Jerry Fodor, Philip Anderson, and David Chalmers, cover the major approaches to emergence. Each of the three sections ("Philosophical Perspectives," "Scientific Perspectives," and "Background and Polemics") begins with an introduction putting the chapters into context and posing key questions for further exploration. A bibliography lists more specialized material, and an associated website (http://mitpress.mit.edu/emergence) links to downloadable software and to other sites and publications about emergence. Contributors: P. W. Anderson, Andrew Assad, Nils A. Baas, Mark A. Bedau, Mathieu S. Capcarrère, David Chalmers, James P. Crutchfield, Daniel C. Dennett, J. Doyne Farmer, Jerry Fodor, Carl Hempel, Paul Humphreys, Jaegwon Kim, Robert B. Laughlin, Bernd Mayer, Brian P. McLaughlin, Ernest Nagel, Martin Nillson, Michael W. Olesen, Paul Oppenheim, Norman H. Packard, David Pines, Steen Rasmussen, Edmund M. A. Ronald, Thomas Schelling, John Searle, Robert S. Shaw, Herbert Simon, Moshe Sipper, Stephen Weinberg, William Wimsatt, and Stephen Wolfram

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Sources	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
Philosophical Perspectives on Emergence	p. 7
Introduction to Philosophical Perspectives on Emergence
The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism	p. 19
On the Idea of Emergence	p. 61
Reductionism and the Irreducibility of Consciousness	p. 69
Emergence and Supervenience	p. 81
Aggregativity: Reductive Heuristics for Finding Emergence	p. 99
How Properties Emerge	p. 111
Making Sense of Emergence	p. 127
Downward Causation and Autonomy in Weak Emergence	p. 155
Real Patterns	p. 189
Scientific Perspectives on Emergence	p. 207
Introduction to Scientific Perspectives on Emergence
More Is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science	p. 221
Emergence	p. 231
Sorting and Mixing: Race and Sex	p. 235
Alternative Views of Complexity	p. 249
The Theory of Everything	p. 259
Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence	p. 269
Design, Observation, Surprise! A Test of Emergence	p. 287
Ansatz for Dynamical Hierarchies	p. 305
Background and Polemics	p. 335
Introduction to Background and Polemics
Newtonianism, Reductionism, and the Art of Congressional Testimony	p. 345
Issues in the Logic of Reductive Explanations	p. 359
Chaos	p. 375
Undecidability and Intractability in Theoretical Physics	p. 387
Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis)	p. 395
Supervenience	p. 411
The Nonreductivist's Troubles with Mental Causation	p. 427
Annotated Bibliography	p. 447
About the Authors	p. 455
Index	p. 459
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