Emergent causal novelty. From early emergentism to the contemporary debate

Abstract

Among metaphysicians, philosophers of science, and scientists, emergent phenomena are usually considered entities that depend on lower-level goings-on while maintaining some autonomy and manifesting some novelty in relation to them. Yet, understanding these features more precisely is an open problem. In this paper, I focus on emergent novelty. In the contemporary debate, this feature has been steadily interpreted in causal terms, and this causal interpretation has often been developed in a power-based framework. Moreover, several authors who played important roles in reintroducing this interpretation in the contemporary debate traced it back to the so-called “British Emergentists”. This paper aims to show that this alleged inheritance should be carefully reassessed. On the one hand, at least some of the early emergentists (John Stuart Mill, Conwy Lloyd Morgan, and Samuel Alexander) did not attach tremendous importance to causal efficacy compared to other forms of emergent novelty that I suggest calling “qualitative”. On the other hand, while contemporary accounts of emergence are prevalently outlined within a non-Humean metaphysical framework in which talk of powers is pertinent, at least some of the early emergentists were prevalently Humean in relation to causality, and explicitly rejected talk of powers or causal properties. Moreover, both Alexander and Lloyd Morgan recognised at least another form of causal efficacy associated with what the former called “Nisus”. This paper suggests that acknowledging and recovering these pluralist views about novelty and causation, besides representing a more accurate reading of early emergentism, would allow for the formulation of better and more comprehensive models of emergence.