RE: BHA: Emergence

["Marshall Feldman" <marsh@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Mervyn,

You said,

> I agree with this, and I think it applies to conceptual emergence too.
> In my recent post I said:
>
> >When I speak of emergent levels among ideas I
> >am thinking of systems of ideas and/or theories and paradigms, not
> >singular ideas.
>
> Perhaps it would be better had I said, 'the causal powers of systems of
> ideas' etc, where a system is a configuration of necessary or internal
> relations. Berth Danermark et al in *Explaining Society: Critical
> Realism in the Social Sciences* Routledge 2002 (which btw is making good
> its claim for me - I'm only half way through - to be the first
> comprehensive presentation of CR and its methodological implications for
> social science), taking their cue from Collier, stress that 'it is just
> the mechanisms that are stratified, not the phenomena - events,
> creatures or things - as such'. So, among life forms, it is not the
> species homo s., or individual members of it, that are emergent, rather
> 'species being' - the novel and irreducible powers and needs of the
> species (e.g. the capacity for language-acquisition). Similarly with
> ideas - it is not singular ideas or ideas in general at the level of the
> Actual that we are talking about, but the power of configurations of
> ideas at the level of the Real. The question of whether conceptual
> emergence is sui generis real would then resolve itself mainly into the
> question of whether systems of ideas, theories, paradigms etc possess
> causal powers in virtue of their internal structure or relatedness (what
> you call necessary relationships). I would say they unquestionably do,
> both in regard to scientific and ideological systems, and not just
> formally but substantively in terms of their content. This is at the
> level of the 'genus'. Within that there is then also stratification,
> definable ultimately in terms of the power of theories etc either to
> grasp other aspects of the stratification of the Real or to occlude and
> mystify this.

This makes things much more clear. I agree with this, now that I understand
better what you were getting at.


Best,
	MF



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