Abstract
Emergence is typically discussed in the context of mental properties or the properties of the natural sciences, and accounts of emergence within these contexts tend to look a certain way. The emergent property is taken to emerge instantaneously out of, or to be proximately caused by, complex interaction of colocated entities. Here, however, I focus on the properties instantiated by the elements of certain systems discussed in social ontology, such as being a five-dollar bill or a pawn-movement, and I suggest that these properties emerge in a distinctive way. They emerge in part because of a system that is far beyond and typically before the object that instantiates them. I characterize how emergence occurs in these cases, juxtaposing it with how emergence is typically discussed. I then consider whether their emergence is best framed as weak or strong as these notions are characterized in the literature, and I reveal what debates are central to answering this question. Though I will not resolve these debates, I do show a collection of views that would vindicate these properties as strongly emergent and downwardly causing.
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Notes
However, thinking of emergence is this context is not wholly without precedents. See Lawson (2013).
See McLaughlin (1992) for a thorough historical overview of the different approaches taken on the emergence of the special sciences for by J.S. Mill, Samuel Alexander, and C.D. Broad among others.
There are other reasons for looking for a different view of emergence besides. I mention O’Connor and Wong’s account because it seems so apparent that our properties will be classified as emergent on it, and part of our aim here is to provide more reasons for thinking that these properties are emergent. That said, I do think that their account is neither necessary nor sufficient: If macroscopic extended simples are possible, perhaps such emergent properties could be instantiated by them. And we may think that composite objects can themselves instantiate fundamental physical properties (e.g., charge or spin). So, I do not think their gloss really captures what is essential to emergence.
For this, we could borrow from the barrage of arguments that have been marshalled to argue for non-identity in the context of material objects or mental properties. For example, we could argue on the basis of causal differences: a five-dollar bill could be argued to have a different causal profile than that of being a piece of paper. (See, inter alia, Heil & Mele [1993], Robb & Heil [2019], and the many works cited within these for arguments of this kind in the context of philosophy of mind.) We could argue on the basis of multiple realizability: a five-dollar bill could have been instantiated by something other than a piece of paper if we had different conventions. (See, inter alia, Polger & Shapiro [2016] and Bickle [2019] for systematic discussions purely on this topic, and see Putnam [1967, 1973], Fodor [1974], and Lewis [1972] for the relevant history of arguments of this kind.) And there are more arguments besides. I only gesture towards how we could argue, however, because it is sufficient to see how the very resources appealed to by emergentists in the philosophy of mind, say, could be just as helpful for our purposes. Some will object to the deployment of some of these arguments, but those writing about the emergence of mental properties will not be a better position to defend themselves.
I suspect that we often understand it this way because it raises a puzzle worth addressing about how it is possible for entities to be non-identical and stand in a relation of supervenience. But this itself does not seem to be the core of the concept of property emergence.
To be fair, Kim himself thought that supervenience and non-reducibility alone were poorly suited to sufficiently characterize emergence. He wrote,
What we have in supervenience and irreducibility, therefore, are two essentially negative conditions, and they do not amount to a positive account of what emergence really is…I believe that one pressing item on the emergentist agenda is to provide an illuminating positive characterization of emergence. ([emphasis in original], 2006:557)
That said, there are ontological questions and debates close by. We may wonder whether we should accept the existence of groups or organizations, for instance. Or we might consider whether accepting non-reducible social science concepts entails certain ontological commitments to serve as the truthmakers of claims involving those concepts.
See Schweikard & Schmid (2013) for a thorough introduction to these topics.
Alternatively, we may think that these properties emerge from mental properties—that mental properties are that base on which these properties supervene and will not reduce. I will leave this issue largely unconsidered. This turns on the nature of the systems under discussion, and we will briefly take up this issue below (in section IV) as indicated. I leave it to the side, however, because it shouldn’t make a difference as long as we assume that mental properties themselves at least supervene on physical properties (as emergentists about these properties would maintain). Given the transitivity of supervenience, then our properties will still supervene and not reduce to physical properties, and so could be understood as emergent relative to them on the characterization above. The emergence of these properties is characterized in section (III) relative to this physical base, but it is worth noting that even if we were to only talk in terms of these properties as emerging from mental properties, the distinctive elements brought out in that section would still be present.
This label allows for an easy contrast with mental and physical properties, though it does perhaps invite some ambiguity. To be clear, again, our concern is for those properties of elements of social systems, not properties of the social systems themselves (as wholes). The former are properties like ‘being a five-dollar bill’ or ‘being a pawn’, whereas the latter are properties such as money’s property of ‘being a medium of exchange’ or chess’s property of ‘being an intellectual game’. Though the ambiguity is unfortunate, notice that the ambiguity here is not unique, as a similar ambiguity is possible when thinking about mental properties. We may be used to thinking of mental properties as properties of elements of the mind, but ‘mental properties’ could also be misread as being properties of the mind itself, such as ‘being clever’ or ‘being of sound memory’. There is, however, a separate and interesting debate concerning the causal efficacy of social structures themselves. See Elder-Vass (2010, 2014a, 2014b) and Wahlberg (2014a, 2014b), Zahle (2014b).
It may be controversial exactly how to think about the existence of these objects, whether they are genuine material objects or else that they are abstract but somehow embodied. (Korman [2020] has recently argued for this kind of existence for establishment like restaurants.) It is interesting that while pawns and bills can have mass and location, money can exist purely digitally, or that we can play chess without pieces just by calling out our moves to one another. However, we do not need to settle this question here. Even if pawns were abstract objects, in our cases the pawn is embodied such that there is still a physical object that has the property of being a pawn, and this property must be reconciled with the broader array of physical properties for physicalism to be true.
It may even be that there are properties instantiated in the social world that are not a part of social systems (and so that will not emerge this way). These would be social properties that are not system-based. Though no example comes to mind, what follows is not meant to fully capture the emergence of every kind of social entity.
Closely related to all of this is how we should think about the existence of social institutions more generally and institutional facts (facts involving elements of those institutions).
It is much too quick to simply say that language is a system, so the property of something’s having a certain linguistic meaning can emerge as a system property. The metaphysics of language is instead a possible application of the idea of system emergence that I merely mean to gesture towards. See Bickhard (2008) for a connection between language and social ontology in the importance of convention.
We may say something similar for much of the law. While we do write down and enforce many laws, much of the law forms as a matter of patterns of judicial decisions rather than as a matter of explicit law-making.
Though non-reductive physicalists about the mind will maintain that mental properties count as physical as well in some sense, or are derivatively physical (Bennett 2008).
It is worth noticing that Silberstein (2017) has recently discussed a kind of emergence dubbed ‘contextual emergence.’ Though I suspect there is some connection between his notion of contextual emergence and how I portray these properties as emerging in the context of a system, it is not entirely clear how to characterize this connection. Insofar as he takes contextual emergence to be the norm amongst properties that actually should be thought of as emergent in the sciences, our views come apart. Further, I have more to say about the nature of social systems in particular and how they suggest diachronic emergence.
I thank a reviewer for drawing me to discuss the clear precedents here.
Interestingly, however, Epstein denies that he is talking about emergence in his depicting groups as failing to supervene on their members. He says, “Emergence is compatible with supervenience. The point we have just discussed, on the other hand, is the failure of supervenience ([italics in original], op. cit., 167). I agree that demonstrating a failure of supervenience is insufficient to establish emergence. However, we are talking about properties that will not reduce to their supervenience base, and that are causally efficacious in their own right (as we will see below). So, they do seem to fit onto our conception of emergence. To be fair, Epstein is talking about objects such as groups, and is less focused on how to think about the properties those groups instantiate.
Raising this point about external mental content may make us wonder whether and how this complicates the more standardized story for the emergence of mental properties. Should we say that many mental properties (insofar as they have content in part set externally) should also not be modeled as emerging synchronically? This is not the place to explore this question, but I will say that I am disposed to think that the externality of mental content should influence the story of the emergence of mental properties in some way. Where this issue has tangentially been relevant concerns the question of whether mental states with wide content can still be causally efficacious. See Williamson (1998), Gibbons (2001), and Yablo (2003) for arguments in the affirmative. If successful, and if these mental properties are emergent, then this would suggest that the properties are strongly emergent (as discussed below) however they emerge.
I also do not mean to suggest that the matter of the possibility of such supervenience bases is settled. Though I think considerations speak highly in favor of granting that items can supervene on other items not proximal to them, there will of course be a story to tell should we want to bite the bullet. We could argue when considering the property of being a pawn, for instance, that the properties of the piece of wood are sufficient to constitute the supervenience base in question if we allow relational features of the wood to its social environment to count amount those physical properties in the base. This would be even more plausible if we independently thought that multi-place, relational properties reduce to one-place properties. Even if we are able to twist ourselves into a view on which the emergence here technically involves only the synchronic interaction of properties, however, the emergence at hand would still be a matter of some item’s relations to the system in question, which is a dramatic departure from other models of emergence.
This is insufficiently careful if we take supervenience and causation to be relations with different relata. However, depending on the relata we choose, there should be a way to translate the relevant talk here to make roughly the same point: that the emergence is indeed causal.
Though precisely how to distinguish these models of causation is a challenging topic within the philosophy of causation itself. We regularly do distinguish between primary causes and background conditions in natural language, and so a view of caution that cannot do justice to or invalidates this distinction may not have the resources to distinguish my view of emergence from O’Connor and Wong’s.
Specifically, he claims that something’s not being predicable from basal conditions, such as relational properties, is insufficient to guarantee that those properties are emergent (ibid., fn.16). This does seem right, but it does not show that relational properties cannot be crucial to the emergence of certain properties.
This disjunction complicates matters somewhat in terms of precisely which properties will qualify as epistemologically emergent. To distinguish their notion from other specifications of weak emergence, I am just treating their cases as those where what really emerges is a novel description or simple explanation for phenomena, where there are no new properties.
Though the systems in question will be a product of our consciousness and agency, we can see how this does not mean that their emergence is necessarily derivative of the emergence of consciousness. Even if there are new fundamental laws that must be added to capture consciousness, adding them is still insufficient to deduce the emergence of our social systems if these laws are indeterministic, as these systems are a product of our free choices. We cannot deduce, for instance, that we will make the rules of chess exactly as we do. Once those rules are made, however, they can be added to the catalogue of laws to predict our future behavior. That said, if our actions are free in this sense, then even a regular instance of my moving my pawn will not be deducible even given the laws of physics, psychology, and the rules of chess; as I might choose otherwise.
The same would be true I think if we took the rules of a social system to be understood entirely in terms of the mental states of individuals charged with governing or acting within that system.
For instance, Hédoin (2015) argues that constitutive rules cannot be fully accounted for by reductionistic views that understand them only in terms of historical behavioral trends.
To not undersell the significance of this question about how to ground these rules, however, we should recognize just how close we are in this discussion to the vast literature on the nature of normativity. We are not only wondering what makes something a pawn-movement, but what makes that pawn-movement appropriate or correct. And we may well think that historical facts there are about past utterances are insufficient to ground facts normative features like correctness. Relatedly, we can notice that it is not simply a matter of someone or other’s making certain utterances that is important for the creation of systems like chess. Also critical is that the utterers have the right kind of authority such that it’s their utterances that matter for setting the rules of chess.
It is not entirely clear how to think about the relation between non-deducibility and causal efficacy or the relative importance for strong emergence. If properties are deducible, then this seems to cut against their causal autonomy (or a freedom to cause this or that), though it may not be incompatible with their being valuable elements in causal explanations. In any case, we need not settle this issue here. See Schröder (1998) for discussion. He maintains that causal impact is more important to emergence, though he has a particular kind of deducibility in mind and in particular is thinking about causal impact through the relatedness of the parts of the supervenience base of an emergent property.
For example, Barnes (2012, pp. 883–884) characterizes the emergent in terms of a ‘robust ontological commitment,’ as these will be new fundamental (though dependent) entities on her understanding of it. Barnes does not explicitly characterize this ontological commitment causally, but at times she says things indicative of a new causal role of emergent entities.
I will note, though, that part of Wahlberg’s concerns involves his rejection of the possibility of downward causation, and there are special things that we can say about downward causation in this context that will be brought out below.
Lawson (op. cit.) also takes elements of social systems to be efficacious in this sense and to indeed be emergent because of it, though he does not characterize the way in which these elements emerge and has a different conception of downward causation than that discussed below.
This goes well with a tradition of so-called ‘intralevelist’ strategies for defending the efficacy of various properties and objects. This involves arguing that higher-level events somehow beat out lower-level events for causing higher-level effects, or else showing that lower-level events are unable to offer a competing causal explanation (Gibbons 2006; Thomasson 1998; Silver forthcoming). This kind of strategy is extremely controversial, though, and it goes well beyond our purposes to argue for it here.
Kim (2006) claims this explicitly. (This should be no surprise given that Kim thinks that higher-level properties can only cause other higher-level properties via downwardly causing their supervenience base.).
See Papineau (2000) for some historical context about physicalism and the closure principle, and Robb & Heil (op. cit.:sec.2.4) for a more reflective discussion of the principle itself and some of the stronger or weaker versions of it.
Kim (2000, p. 40) glosses closure in just this way: “One way of stating the principle of physical causal closure is this: If you pick any physical event and trace out its causal ancestry or posterity, that will never take you outside the physical domain.” Papineau (op. cit.) also characterizes closure in this way, where physical events have a ‘purely physical’ history.
Prosser (2012) offers a reading of causal closure that purports to allow for downward causation, though his view of this will require indeterministic laws at the base level. Garcia (2014) argues directly against needing to understand closure in terms of proximal causation. Also see Moore (2019), which catalogues a whole menu of ways scholars have seemed to relax the causal closure principle in order to avoid exclusion worries.
O’Connor and Wong at one point also quickly note that in some sense the products of downward causation will be contained in the causal profiles of the physical causes of emergent properties (op. cit.:668), though I think they severely undersell this point. If what reductionists are perhaps most worried about is some sort of inexplicable invasion or intrusion upon the regular goings-on of physics by higher-level properties, then recognizing that ultimately local intrusions by higher-level properties are causally explained by physics itself should significantly quell their concerns. What’s more, this is a response to the worry concerning closure that will be available to any account of emergence in which the emergence involves upwards causation.
Another likely concern is that there is simply something spooky about downward causation, a sense that physical events really must have proximate physical causes (regardless of our closure principle), perhaps because it is not clear how social events make contact with the physical world or that physical effects require physical changes. We lack the space to do this kind of concern justice; however, a proponent of downward causation can say a few things quickly in response. First, we can grant that physical effects cannot occur without some proximate physical change to their environment, though we may deny that any of those changes constitute events that compete as causes of the effect. Second, we may adopt different ways of thinking about the downward causation, perhaps framing downward causes as constraints on lower-level facts (as Chalmers [op. cit.] does).
The case made here could also be used to argue that other properties that emerge causally are in a position to downwardly cause while abiding by causal closure. However, it would also need to be that there is no clear proximate physical events competing to cause the effects in question, and we saw that the distal supervenience base for social systems properties provides some reason for why they in particular might lack such competition.
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Silver, K. Emergence within social systems. Synthese 199, 7865–7887 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03143-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03143-2