Synthese special issue: Non-Standard Approaches to Emergence
Synthese special issue: Non-Standard Approaches to Emergence
Guest editors: Olivier Sartenaer (Cologne) and Umut Baysan (Oxford)
Submission deadline: August 21, 2019.
Aims and scope:
When British emergentists initially appealed to the concept of emergence in the early 20th century, they aimed at laying the groundwork of a philosophy of nature that was supposed to constitute a middle course between two antagonistic worldviews, namely (and in a knowingly anachronistic phrasing) reductive physicalism and nonphysicalist dualism. Emergence, as a relation between an “emergent” and its “emergence base”, was indeed to be construed from the very start as a conjunction of two demands. First – call this the “dependence demand”, which is in tension with some versions of dualism – emergents were thought to somehow depend on their bases. Second – this is the “distinctness demand”, which prima facie conflicts with a reductive version of physicalism – emergents were also to be considered as distinct from their bases. From the outset, emergence was given an ontological guise. It was put at the service of an overall view of the natural world that contains things which, though ultimately dependent on a common and unifying physical basis, are also genuinely distinct from it.
Although emergentism initially intended to resolve the conflict between physicalism and dualism, it is somewhat ironic that, today, an avatar of this conflict inexorably remains within emergentism itself. Far from constituting the originally targeted mediating middle course, contemporary emergentism is indeed fragmented in a strongly polarized variety of emergentisms, some of them giving the upper hand to dependence at the expense of distinctness (hence coming close to physicalism), some favouring distinctness over dependence (hence verging rather on dualism). Such a polarization has been recently codified into the existence of two mutually exclusive schemas for emergence, into which every possible form of emergentism has been claimed to necessarily fit, namely (physicalist-friendly) “weak emergentism” and (nonphysicalist-friendly) “strong emergentism” (Wilson 2015). Between both these schemas it seems that no conciliatory middle course is to be found. This led some philosophers to adopt a deflationary stance with respect to the initial pretence of emergentism: in no way could one ever coherently “have the cake and eat it too” (Kim 2005; Taylor 2015; for responses that are available for a standard conception of emergence, see Baysan & Wilson 2017).
Yet, recent and independent developments, driven by distinct core motivations (e.g. of a historical, metaphysical or empirical nature), have concomitantly participated in mitigating this somewhat pessimistic overview of the state of play. Despite their surface differences, all these endeavours happen to converge on a common attitude. All in their own way, they cast doubt upon (at least) one of the core implicit assumptions of “traditional” (weak or strong) emergentism, leading them to aim at fulfilling the initial emergentist promise – of rendering physicalism hospitable to a genuine ontological diversity – in non-standard way. These new approaches to emergence can be classified into the following three (not necessarily exclusive) families of non-standard emergentism, according to the traditional background assumption that they are willing to discard:
(i) Diachronic emergentism (against the canonical requirement that emergence ought to be exclusively construed as a relation holding between relata that are instantiated simultaneously);
(ii) Flat emergentism (against the canonical requirement that emergence ought to be exclusively construed as a hierarchical relation, such that its relata should belong to different “levels”); and
(iii) Epiphenomenal emergentism (against the canonical requirement that emergence ought to be exclusively construed as a relation involving causal/determinative novelty).
The proposed special issue, Non-Standard Approaches to Emergence, intends to be the first publication in which the philosophical relevance and stakes of these recent and independent developments is systematically probed, both from a metaphysical and an empirical perspective, through investigations pertaining to the following (non-exhaustive) set of questions:
- How to properly define diachronic/flat/epiphenomenal emergence?
- Are there different possible varieties of diachronic/flat/epiphenomenal emergence?
- In which sense does diachronic/flat/epiphenomenal emergence manage to reconcile physicalism and (genuine) antireductionism (if it does at all)?
- Is diachronic/flat/epiphenomenal emergentism a bona fide variety of emergentism, despite it being non-standard?
- Is diachronic/flat/epiphenomenal emergence targeted by the same issues as traditional synchronic/hierarchical/causal emergence? And by new ones?
- What is the relationship between diachronic/flat/epiphenomenal emergence and reductionism, determinism, physicalism, supervenience, downward causation or the unity of science?
- Is diachronic/flat/epiphenomenal emergence really a new (family of) concept(s), or does it have some roots in early emergentism (or pre-emergentism)?
- Are there plausible empirical cases of diachronic/flat/epiphenomenal emergence (perhaps in physics, chemistry, biology, cognitive science,etc.)?
- If so, what are the possible consequences of these putative cases for the corresponding fields?
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