Explanatory emergence as a guide to metaphysical structure

Abstract

The view that there is a distinction between strong, or metaphysical, emergence and weak, or explanatory, emergence, is widely accepted. It is natural, on this view, to regard accounts of strong and of weak emergence as performing different kinds of work, such that strong conceptions of emergence help us to uncover metaphysical structure, while weak conceptions of emergence help us to understand the limits of our scientific explanations. If we accept this division of labor, then it appears that we cannot use an account of weak, explanatory emergence to find out about metaphysical structure.In this paper, I explore the view that explanatory conceptions of emergence cannot be used for metaphysical purposes, and argue that it is false. Even those who reject strong emergence can, at least in principle, use certain explanatory accounts of emergence as guides to metaphysical structure. On this approach, emergence itself is explanatory, but explanatory emergence may sometimes obtain for metaphysical reasons.

Power Emergentism and the Collapse Problem

“…I have argued that some cases of explanatory emergence may obtain for metaphysical reasons, given a metaphysics of explanation on which certain explanations can be unavailable for metaphysical reasons, such as if the unavailability of a causal explanation of one phenomenon in terms of another indicates that there is no causal connection between them. However, establishing such connections between explanation and metaphysics does not straightforwardly follow from explanatory emergentism (Taylor 2015a(Taylor , 2017b. Some property's merely being emergent, on an explanatory view, is not enough to establish metaphysical autonomy.…”

“…Finally, it seems that some of the most intriguing and interesting cases of apparent emergence that this emergent objects strategy accommodates involve an explanatory gap, as in Nida-Rümelin's discussion of consciousness (2006). Given that explanatory considerations drive these cases, they can be accommodated by the explanatory approach to emergence, which not only makes room for such cases, but also offers strategies for identifying and contextualizing such explanatory gaps and working out when it may be legitimate to draw metaphysical conclusions from the unavailability of explanations (Taylor 2017b).…”

“…Similarly, we can compare cases of emergence relativized to different definitions of explanation and different standards for unavailability. I have argued that because of these features, this view offers a useful framework for clarifying historical and contemporary debates about emergence, including debates about the explanatory gap in philosophy of mind, and historical debates between mechanists and vitalists (Taylor 2017b). It can also be used in combination with a metaphysics of explanation to identify cases of emergence that obtain for metaphysical reasons.…”

Collapsing strong emergence’s collapse problem

“…It is impossible to deduce the properties of a strongly emergent whole from a complete knowledge of the properties of the constituent parts of a whole, according to the metaphysical version of Strong Emergence articulated by Broad (1925), when those parts are either isolated from the whole or constituents of other wholes. Taylor (2015Taylor ( , 2017aTaylor ( , 2017bTaylor ( , 2022 proposes a version of the Collapse Problem. Suppose that macro-level property p strongly emerges when micro-level components A and B combine in relation r. However, each component has the property that it can combine with the other in r to produce a whole with p. Broad's nondeducibility criterion is not met, and p collapses into the micro-level.…”

“…There are several versions of Strong Emergence, such as those of Broad (1925), Chalmers (1996Chalmers ( , 2006, Merricks (2001), Morrison (2012), Gillett (2016), Humphreys (2016), Wilson (2010Wilson ( , 2013Wilson ( , 4 2015Wilson ( , 2021, and Baysan (2020). There are also several versions of what Taylor (2015) refers to as "the Collapse Problem" of Strong Emergence, such as those of Broad (1925), Grelling's criticism of the epistemological account of emergence discussed in Hempel and Oppenheim (1948, 148), O'Connor (1994), Shoemaker (2007), Howell (2009), Taylor (2015Taylor ( , 2017aTaylor ( , 2017bTaylor ( , 2022, Skiles (2016), and Baysan and Wilson (2017). Although the Collapse Problem can be formulated metaphysically, its initial intuitive appeal results from its epistemological articulation, and so this article focuses on Broad's epistemological criterion for metaphysical Strong Emergence and Taylor's version of the Collapse Problem.…”