The Question of Emergence by Douglas V Porpora

The Question of Emergence by Douglas V Porpora

This book takes the relationship between physics and sociology as its subject, focusing on the philosophical dispute between emergentism and reductionism. It argues that the mystery behind emergence disappears when we abandon the lawful understanding of causality in favor of a powers view.

Adopting a critical realist perspective, it offers a completely novel approach, arguing that the mystery associated with emergence is an artifact of the Humean covering law model of causality assumed by both sides of the reductionism and emergentist debate. In this debate, both reductionists and emergentists have focused on how a single whole or composite relates to its parts and have commonly operated with an understanding of causality in terms of lawful regularities among events. As a result, emergentists have been left with a dilemma: Either admit that laws governing higher-level behavior can be explained by lower-level laws, which is reductionism, or leave the existence of the higher-level laws a mystery.

The first book-length publication that addresses – and attempts to resolve – the debate over emergence and reductionism and that gives attention to emergence across the ontological levels from physics to social behavior, it will have a lively readership among critical realists. It will also be of interest to philosophers of mind, philosophers of science, social scientists, and theoretically oriented practitioners in chemistry, biology, and psychology.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

Douglas V. Porpora is Emeritus Professor of Sociology in the Department of Communication at Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA. He has written widely on politics and social theory, most recently Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach.