Here I offer a precise analysis of what it takes for a property to count as emergent. The features widely considered crucial to emergence include novelty, unpredictability, supervenience, relationality, and downward causal influence. By acknowledging each of these distinctive features, the definition provided below captures an important sense in which the whole can be more than the sum of its parts.Fans of emergent properties believe that sometimes the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Since talk of emergent properties continues to remain popular in the philosophical literature (especially in the philosophy of mind), it would be nice to know exactly what this slogan means. Then we could decide whether emergence actually does obtain, and if so how pervasive it really is.Here I provide an analysis of the concept of emergence that captures each of its widely recognized ingredients. Sections 1 and 2 highlight three of these ingredients-novelty, supervenience, and unpredictability-the second two of which notoriously seem to conflict. The following sections consider various ways to render the supervenience and unpredictability claims compatible, ending in section 5 with the definition I favor. It is then shown, in section 6, how the definition proposed captures another commonly recognized ingredient, downward causal influence, and how this feature, too, is rendered compatible with the supervenience requirement. By capturing each of these widely recognized ingredients, the analysis
Abstract:Those who endorse the Psychological Continuity Approach (PCA) to analyzing personal identity need to impose a non-branching constraint to get the intuitively correct result that in the case of fission , one person becomes two. With the help of Brueckner's (2005) discussion, it is shown here that the sort of non-branching clause that allows proponents of PCA to provide sufficient conditions for being the same person actually runs contrary to the very spirit of their theory. The problem is first presented in connection with perdurantist versions of PCA. The difficulty is then shown to apply to endurantist versions as well.
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