[Marxism] Emergence and the Logic of Explanation: An Argument for the Unity of Science

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Wolfgang Hofkirchner

Emergence and the Logic of Explanation

An Argument for the Unity of Science

In: Acta Polytechnica Scandinavica, Mathematics, Computing and Management in
Engineering Series 91 (1998), 23-30



CONTENTS:

Introduction
<http://igw.tuwien.ac.at/igw/Menschen/hofkirchner/papers/InfoScience/Emergen
ce_Logic_Expl/echo.html#introduction  > 

Self-organization and emergence 

The misperception of the dialectic of old and new  

The misperception of the dialectic of parts and whole  

Dialectical emergentism as a philosophy of self-organization 

Emergence and determinism  

The clockwork view 

Incomplete Determinism  

Incomplete determinism and the methodology of science  

The failure of the "naturalistic" logic of explanation

The failure of the "culturalistic" methodologies of understanding 

In need of a dialectical logic 

A model of self-organization in social systems 

References 

Abstract

It does not come as a surprise that, due to the rise of self-organization
concepts, the concept of emergence has been revisited. Actually, the latter
may serve as a proper philosophical foundation of the former, if the
self-organization paradigm is understood as a turn away from the mechanistic
world view and if the philosophy of emergence gets rid of its idealistic
heritage as well. The paper outlines the basic pattern of emergence set up
in such a way as to comprise the diachronous dimension of evolution along
with the synchronous dimension of hierarchical systems. Having recapitulated
these ontological premises it discusses how explanations are supposed to
work. Since indeterminacy is deemed here to play a vital role in emergentist
arguments, dialectical reasoning is proposed to augment considerations that
are based on formal logic only. Thus the old logic of explanation á la
Hempel/Oppenheim turns out to be just a special kind of argumentation which
applies to mechanical systems instead of evolutionary systems. The paper
concludes by showing that ? contrary to the naturalistic misunderstanding
which assumes an extension of methods of natural science to the domain of
social science ? it is, in fact, by virtue of taking indeterminacy into
account that the new logic of emergence and downward causation prepares the
grounds for unifying natural and social sciences.

Keywords: Evolutionary systems, determinism, explanation vs. understanding,
reductionism, holism, dualism, emergentism, dialectics, social science

Introduction

Since the sixties and the seventies, when for the first time in science
theoretical considerations and experiments were carried out in terms of
self-organization, the replacement of system theory I and cybernetics I with
system theory II and cybernetics II and the overcoming of the restricted
Darwinian model of biological evolution have set the stage for synthesizing
systems thinking and evolutionary thinking, and for elaborating on a general
theory of evolutionary systems ? a theory which is to comprise the
interweaving and the rise and fall of real-world systems whatsoever. This
paradigm shift affects not only the disciplines of science one by one. It is
so profound a change that it affects philosophy and world view as well. 

In this paper I will focus on the following ontological and epistemological
implications of evolutionary systems thinking: 

(1) How is self-organization supposed to work in real world systems? 

(2) What kind of explanatory power does the formula of self-organization
contain?



_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism