Abstract
I outline how scientific emergentism has prosecuted a quiet revolution in the sciences built around a new guiding picture of nature and the novel methodologies, and models/explanations, it provides. At its heart, on the basis of empirical findings, scientific emergentism endorses “Mutualism” under which parts and whole are mutually determinative. I outline how the new Mutualist guiding picture of nature that results provides novel models/explanations for scientists to tackle natural phenomena at the frontiers of science. Crucially, I also show that such Mutualist models/explanations supplement, rather than supplant, the compositional and causal models/explanations driving existing methodologies.
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Notes
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Though neglected, there has been philosophical work on compositional explanation that goes back at least to early work by Fodor (1968) and Dennett (1969), through Wimsatt (1976), down to more recent work such as Bechtel and Richardson (1993), Glennan (1996), Machamer, Darden and Craver (2000) and Craver (2007), amongst many others. See Aizawa and Gillet (2019) for an outline of some of the various species of compositional explanation.
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Aizawa and Gillet (2019).
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Aizawa and Gillet (2019).
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See Gillett (Forthcoming) for a more detailed discussion of such integration. We thus have another example of what Mitchell (2003) terms “integrative pluralism” in multiple, but integrated, models.
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I should note that I have defined differential powers to leave it open whether their contribution is determined by a composed entity or other component level entities. I also intend differential powers to include not only extra powers that add to the powers contributed in simpler collectives, but also contracted sets of powers excluding powers contributed in simpler collectives. There can also be mixed cases where differential powers are both added and subtracted.
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Strictly speaking, it is most plausibly an “emergent” activity or property of a whole that downwardly (machretically) determines that a realizing property of some part contributes a differential power and hence has a differential behavior/activity. However, for ease of exposition I have throughout the paper talked about wholes downwardly determining parts. The reader should take me to mean this more nuanced situation involving an activity or property of a whole when talking of such whole-to-part determination.
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Thick causal relations are usually relations of activity. In contrast, thin causal relations are captured by manipulability or difference-making accounts that require not such relation of activity between their relata.
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Laughlin (2005), p. xvi.
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For a more detailed discussion of the new methodologies under scientific emergentism se Mitchell (2009).
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See Juarrero (1999) for discussion of some of these Mutualist models and their features.
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Gillett, C. (2022). Scientific Emergentism and the Mutualist Revolution: A New Guiding Picture of Nature, New Methodologies and New Models. In: Wuppuluri, S., Stewart, I. (eds) From Electrons to Elephants and Elections. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92192-7_6
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