Emergence is intuitively characterized as dependent novelty. Yet, besides this intuition, several formulations of it were elaborated in the last decades. In this article, after having distinguished between two different varieties of emergence, I aim at providing two formulation schemes for emergence. This could help to explain what emergence is and to clarify and unify the suggested formulations. The general idea behind my schemes is that emergence is partial and qualified dependence of the emergent entities on their emergence bases. After (...) having examined several formulations of emergences and presented my schemes, I shall analyse two interesting consequences of the acceptance of the latter: the in principle compatibility between weak and strong emergence and the idea that micro-physicalism, i.e., the main competitor of emergentism, may actually come in different degrees of strength, more or less in contrast with emergentism. Eventually, I shall briefly compare my formulation schemes with some other relevantly similar proposals. (shrink)

Most philosophical accounts of emergence are based on supervenience, with supervenience being an ontologically synchronic relation of determination. This conception of emergence as a relation of supervenience, I will argue, is unable to make sense of the kinds of emergence that are widespread in self-organizing and nonlinear dynamical systems, including distributed cognitive systems. In these dynamical systems, an emergent property is ontological and diachronic.

This paper examines the application of the mutual manipulability criterion as a way to demarcate constituents of cognitive systems from resources having a mere causal influence on cognitive systems. In particular, it is argued that on at least one interpretation of the mutual manipulability criterion, the criterion is inadequate because the criterion is conceptualized as identifying synchronic dependence between higher and lower ‘levels’ in mechanisms. It is argued that there is a second articulation of the mutual manipulability criterion available, and (...) that it should be preferred for at least two reasons. The first is that the criterion of mutual manipulability is an instance of continuous reciprocal causation. The second is that it has implications for how to understand this distinction between causation and constitution. It is shown that when considering dynamic systems, continuous reciprocal causation - ubiquitous in dynamical systems - is a form of constitutive causality, which entails that causal factors may, in the right circumstances, by genuine constitutive factors of cognition. This notion of constitutive causality lends support to conceiving of the mutual manipulability criterion as a genuine demarcation principle in the debate over the boundaries of mind. (shrink)

Recent philosophical discourse on emergence has developed with particular concern for the distinction between weak and strong emergence and with the primary focus on detailed analysis of the concept of supervenience. However, in the last decade and as a new departure, attention has been devoted to the distinction between synchronic and diachronic emergence. In this philosophical context, there is an ongoing general belief that these two concepts are so different that it is impossible to establish for them a general unifying (...) framework. It is the purpose of this paper to support an alternative view, i.e. that these concepts are different but not mutually exclusive, and that attending to appearance and persistence can, in this context, lead to an acceptable unifying framework for these two, differing concepts of emergence. (shrink)

We claim that, as it stands, the Deutsch–Wallace–Everett approach to quantum theory is conceptually incoherent. This charge is based upon the approach’s reliance upon decoherence arguments that conflict with its own fundamental precepts regarding probabilistic reasoning in two respects. This conceptual conflict obtains even if the decoherence arguments deployed are aimed merely towards the establishment of certain ‘emergent’ or ‘robust’ structures within the wave function: To be relevant to physical science notions such as robustness must be empirically grounded, and, on (...) our analysis, this grounding can only plausibly be done in precisely the probabilistic terms that lead to conceptual conflict. Thus, the incoherence problems presented necessitate either the provision of a new, non-probabilistic empirical grounding for the notions of robustness and emergence in the context of decoherence, or the abandonment of the Deutsch–Wallace–Everett programme for quantum theory. (shrink)

An effective theory in physics is one that is supposed to apply only at a given length scale; the framework of effective field theory describes a ‘tower’ of theories each applying at different length scales, where each ‘level’ up is a shorter-scale theory. Owing to subtlety regarding the use and necessity of EFTs, a conception of emergence defined in terms of reduction is irrelevant. I present a case for decoupling emergence and reduction in the philosophy of physics. This paper develops (...) a positive conception of emergence, based on the novelty and autonomy of the ‘levels’, by considering physical examples, involving critical phenomena, the renormalisation group, and symmetry breaking. This positive conception of emergence is related to underdetermination and universality, but, I argue, is preferable to other accounts of emergence in physics that rely on universality. (shrink)

Some explanations in social science, psychology and biology belong to a higher level than other explanations. And higher explanations possess the virtue of abstracting away from the details of lower explanations, many philosophers argue. As a result, these higher explanations are irreplaceable. And this suggests that there are genuine higher laws or patterns involving social, psychological and biological states. I show that this ‘abstractness argument’ is really an argument schema, not a single argument. This is because the argument uses the (...) ‘is lower than’ relation, and this relation admits of different readings. I then suggest four rigorous definitions of the ‘is lower than’ relation, and show that the abstractness argument’s prospects are much brighter for some of these definitions than for others. To show this, I evaluate the so-called ‘disjunctive threat’ to the abstractness argument. (shrink)

In the thesis I offer an analysis of the metaphysical underpinnings of the extended cognition thesis via an examination of standard views of metaphysical building (or, dependence) relations. -/- In summary form, the extended cognition thesis is a view put forth in naturalistic philosophy of mind stating that the physical basis of cognitive processes and cognitive processing may, in the right circumstances, be distributed across neural, bodily, and environmental vehicles. As such, the extended cognition thesis breaks substantially with the still (...) widely held view in cognitive science and philosophy of mind, namely that cognitive processes and cognitive processing take place within the skin-and-skull of individual organisms. The standard view of metaphysical building relations can be expressed as the conjunction of two theses. First, that a metaphysical building relation – such as composition, constitution, realization, supervenience or emergence – is a relation of ontological dependence, because if a metaphysical building relation holds between X (or the Xs) and Y, then it is in virtue of X (or the Xs) that Y exists. Second, metaphysical building relations are synchronic (durationless) relations of ontological dependence. In the thesis, I propose an alternative diachronic framework by which to extend the standard synchronic accounts of metaphysical dependence relations, and by which to reformulate the metaphysical foundation of the extended cognition thesis. The project fills an important gap between analytical metaphysics (in particular, the metaphysics of dependence relations) and naturalistic philosophy of mind (especially the extended cognition thesis). To my knowledge there has been no attempt to establish a robust diachronic account of metaphysical building (or, dependence) relations such as, e.g., composition and constitution. However, this is precisely what I argue is required to properly advance and ground the metaphysics of extended cognition. Ultimately, my aim of reformulating the metaphysics of extended cognition consists in taking several steps toward a third-wave of extended cognition. (shrink)

Quantum gravity is understood as a theory that, in some sense, unifies general relativity (GR) and quantum theory, and is supposed to replace GR at extremely small distances (high-energies). It may be that quantum gravity represents the breakdown of spacetime geometry described by GR. The relationship between quantum gravity and spacetime has been deemed ``emergence'', and the aim of this thesis is to investigate and explicate this relation. After finding traditional philosophical accounts of emergence to be inappropriate, I develop a (...) new conception of emergence by considering physical case studies including condensed matter physics, hydrodynamics, critical phenomena and quantum field theory understood as effective field theory. This new conception of emergence is unconcerned with the ideas of reduction and derivation (i.e. it holds that we may have emergence with reduction or without it). Instead, a low-energy theory (or model) is understood as emergent from a high-energy theory if it is novel and autonomous compared to the high-energy theory, and the low-energy physics is dependent in a particular, minimal sense on the high-energy physics (this dependence is revealed by the techniques of effective field theory and the renormalisation group). While novelty is construed in a broad sense, the autonomy comes essentially from the underdetermination of the high-energy theory by the low-energy theory, which reflects the minimal way in which the emergent, low-energy theory depends on the high-energy one. It results from the scaling behaviour of the theories and the limiting relations between them, and is demonstrated by the renormalisation group and effective field theory techniques, the idea of universality, and the phenomenon of symmetry-breaking. These ideas are important in exploring the relationship between quantum gravity and GR, where GR is understood as an effective, low-energy theory of quantum gravity. Without experimental data or a theory of quantum gravity, we rely on principles and techniques from other areas of physics to guide the way. As well as considering the idea of emergence appropriate to treating GR as an effective field theory, I investigate the emergence of spacetime (and other aspects of GR) in several concrete approaches to quantum gravity, including examples of the condensed matter approaches, the ``discrete approaches'' (causal set theory, causal dynamical triangulations, quantum causal histories and quantum graphity) and loop quantum gravity. (shrink)