Emergence Reframed

Abstract

This chapter presents, motivates, and defends a strategy for characterizing emergence and its role in scientific research, grounded in the analysis of black boxes. Emergents can be characterized as black boxes: placeholders in causal explanations represented in models. The present proposal has the welcome implications of bringing together various usages of emergence across domains, and to reconcile emergence with reduction. Yet, this does come at a cost. It requires abandoning a rigid perspective according to which emergence is an intrinsic or absolute feature of systems, in favor or a more contextual approach that relativizes the emergent status of a property or behavior to a specific explanatory frame of reference.