Re: BHA: Emergence

["Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Mervyn--

>                    While I didn't intend
> it to be so, I accept that 'camp' was an unfortunate choice of word and
> am sorry I used it.

Appreciated; my own "rather divisive" was stronger than necessary.  But the
main issue was that I had repeatedly pointed out that Marko quite
insistently and you to a limited extent had misrepresented or distorted my
position.  While I recognized that Marko was using a reductio argument, it
was an argument against a position sharply at odds with what I had said (a
position that I oppose).  Misunderstanding a position on the role of social
activity in science but being willing to engage the matter is one thing;
treating all claims for social aspects as being outright super-idealism is
quite another.  The flip side would be for a someone to say "Hi, I'm here to
learn about critical realism" but then treat your claims for the real
existence of things outside the mind as precisely and absolutely identical
to the worst and more reductive sort of positivism, and time after time
attack or dismiss every one of your statements in that manner (with a fellow
realist saying "Well, he has a point" to boot!).

Anyway, if Marko takes my criticism of his manners as personal abuse and
cause to leave this list, I think that's a regrettable decision on his part.

Re intra- and superstructural emergence, I think all superstructural
emergence is necessarily also intrastructural, and I fully agree with the
perspectival switch on that.  But I'm still not convinced that the converse
is true -- that all intrastructural emergence is necessarily also
superstructural.  For example, let's say that a pack of wolves and a pack of
coyotes meet and interbreed, giving rise to coy-wolves.  I would consider
the new breed to be an instance of intrastructural emergence within the
canine world.  Can you clarify how it would also be superstructural
emergence?  What new structure has emerged, with capacities that can react
back on the original structure (which is what I take "superstructural" to
mean)?

T.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus@xxxxxxxx
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce




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