Emergence in Context

Abstract

Abstract This is a book about the multidisciplinary topic of emergence. Science, philosophy of science, and metaphysics have long been concerned with the question of how order, stability, and novelty are possible and how they happen. How can order come out of disorder? We provide a new account of emergence, contextual emergence, that attempts to answer these questions. Contextual emergence is grounded primarily in the sciences, as opposed to logic or metaphysics. It is both an explanatory and ontological account of emergence that gets us beyond the impasse between “weak” and “strong” emergence in the emergence debates. Contextual emergence challenges the “foundationalist” or hierarchical picture of reality. It emphasizes the ontological and explanatory fundamentality of multiscale stability conditions and their contextual constraints, often operating globally over interconnected, interdependent, and interacting entities and their multiscale relations. Contextual emergence focuses on the conditions that make the existence, stability, and persistence of emergent systems and their states and observables possible. These conditions and constraints are irreducibly multiscale relations, so it is not surprising that scientific explanation is often multiscale. Such multiscale conditions act as gatekeepers for systems to access modal possibilities (e.g. reducing or enhancing a system’s degrees of freedom). Using examples from across the sciences ranging from physics to biology to neuroscience and beyond, we demonstrate that there is an empirically well-grounded, viable alternative to ontological reductionism coupled with explanatory antireductionism (weak emergence) and ontological disunity coupled with the impossibility of robust scientific explanation (strong emergence). Central metaphysics of science concerns are also addressed.