Re: BHA: Emergence

[viren viven murthy <vvmurthy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Ruth and other friends:

Your comments were extremely helpful.  I had clearly misunderstood
Bhaskar's concept of emergence and need to spend some time with it.  In
DPF, he succinctly defines emergence in the manner you describe:

"A relationship between two terms such that one term diachronically or
perhaps synchronically arises out of the other, but is capable of reacting
back on the first and is in any event causally and taxonomically
irreducible to it."(397)

 I think that I was confused because in his chapter on emergence,
Bhaskar seems constantly to associate it with novelty:

"In emergence, generally, new beings (entities, structures, totalities,
concepts) are generated out of pre-existing material from which they
could have been neither induced nor deduced."(49)

So on this reading, to say morality is emergent is to say that it is new
with respect to the pre-existing material from which it is generated.  I
suppose, here the pre-existing material is the body.

I had interpreted emergence in a more simplistic manner as "to come to
being through evolution."  Now I would like to inquire about the
relationship between these two conceptions of emergence or the
relationship between emergence and change. Bhaskar links the two in the
following manner:

"Emergence entails both stratification and change.  But if, as I have
argued, all changes are spatio-temporal, and space-time is a relational
property of the meshwork of material beings, this opens up the phenomena
of emergent spatio-temporalities."(53)

So in Bhaskar's view, time and space, which are the conditions for change,
themselves emerge from material beings.  He later goes on to note that
conceptual change exploits the past or exterior cognitive
resources.  Hence I wonder whether he would say that new ideas emerge from
old ideas and that the present emerges from the past.  Clearly the present
is causally irreducible to the past, but I wonder whether Bhaskar would
say that the present arises out of it.  If he agrees to this, the only
thing preventing us from saying that the present emerges out of the past
would be the idea of the present causally affecting the past.  More
specifically, with respect to ideas, could one morality emerge from
another.  Does for example, Hegelianism emerge from Kantianism?  Of
course, here we are not dealing with ontologically different levels, but
I am not sure whether ontological difference is an essential part of
conceptual emergence, in Bhaskar's view.

Viren

On Thu, 21 Mar 2002, Ruth Groff wrote:

> Hi Viren:
>
> I only have a minute, and I'm going to HAVE to resist really getting into this debate ,,, but I wanted to say that I'm not sure that we are using the term emergence in the same way.  When I say that I think that moral beliefs, like other beliefs, are "emergent," what I mean is that they are predicates of persons and not of physiological or biological processes.  Another way to say it is that beliefs only come into existence at a given ontological level; they presuppose and are contingent upon, but are neither equivalent to nor reducible to, the physiological entities upon which they supervene.  Same with entities like "society" vis-a-vis individuals.  You seem to mean by the term something less technical, more like "develops out of, over time," or something along those lines.
>
> Not sure if this changes anything in terms of your position, but at least it might clarify mine.
>
> Gotta go -- sorry not to engage more substantively with your post.  I'm sure others can do it more justice anyway.
>
> Warmly,
> Ruth
>
>
>
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