Emergence, Dependence, and Fundamentality

Pearson, Olley

Abstract

In a recent paper Barnes proposes to characterize ontological emergence by identifying the emergent entities with those entities which are both fundamental and dependent. Barnes offers characterizations of the notions of fundamentality and dependence, but is cautious about committing to the specifics of these notions. This paper argues that Barnes’s characterization of emergence is problematic in several ways. Firstly, emergence is a relation, and merely delimiting relata of this relation tells us little about it. Secondly, the group of entities delimited as dependent and fundamental do not appear to be the group of emergent entities. Rather, some entities appear to be dependent and fundamental and not emergent, whilst other entities appear to be emergent and not dependent and fundamental. The moral drawn is that in order to provide a characterization of emergence one must go beyond what Barnes says explicitly. It is also shown that a potentially fruitful way of doing this would be to further specify the notion of dependence at issue revealing it to be asymmetric and perhaps merely nomological. In a recent paper Barnes offers a characterization of emergence (2012). Emergent entities are said to be those which are both fundamental and dependent. In giving this characterization Barnes utilizes some meta-ontological views that will not be universally accepted. I will not challenge these views themselves but instead the use Barnes makes of them. In Sect. 1, I provide a brief description of emergence and then a proposed characterization of it offered by Barnes, which I call FundDep. In Sect. 2, I argue that to get the most out of FundDep one must read more into it than is explicitly stated. FundDep only explicitly delimits the class of putatively emergent entities, but emergence is a relation and delimiting the relata of a relation is not sufficient to characterize it. In Sects. 3 and 4, I argue that the group of entities delimited by FundDep is not the group of emergent entities according to common conceptions of that notion. There are plausibly emergent entities that lie outside the proposed group (Sect. 3) and entities within the proposed group which are not emergent (Sect. 4). These faults generally follow from the notion of dependence central to FundDep, which is hence shown to be inadequate. However, Barnes does not fully commit to this notion, and so in Sect. 5 I consider how one might build on what Barnes says by developing a more nuanced characterization of dependence.

Citation

Pearson, O. (2018). Emergence, Dependence, and Fundamentality. Erkenntnis, 83(3), 391-402. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9895-1

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 24, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Apr 8, 2017
• Publication Date: Jun 1, 2018
• Deposit Date: Jun 12, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 13, 2017
• Journal: Erkenntnis
• Print ISSN: 0165-0106
• Electronic ISSN: 1572-8420
• Publisher: Springer
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 83
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 391-402
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9895-1
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1357538