Holism and emergence: Dynamical complexity defeats laplace's demon
| Abstract | The paradigm of Laplacean determinism combines three regulative principles: determinism, predictability, and the explanatory adequacy of universal laws together with purely local conditions. Historically, it applied to celestial mechanics, but it has been expanded into an ideal for scientific theories whose cogency is often not questioned. Laplace's demon is an idealization of mechanistic scientific method. Its principles together assumes imply reducibility, and rule out holism and emergence. I will argue that Laplacean determinism fails even in the realm of planetary dynamics, and that it does not give suitable criteria for explanatory success except within very well defined and rather exceptional domains. Ironically, the very successes of Laplacean method in the Solar System were made possible only by processes that are not themselves tractable to Laplacean methodology. The results of some of these processes were first observed in 1964, but despite the falsification of Laplacean methodology, the explanatory resources of holism and emergence remain in scientific limbo. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,672 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Only published papers are available at libraries |
Similar books and articlesN. G. Kampen (1991). Determinism and Predictability. Synthese 89 (2):273 - 281.
Bryon Cunningham (2001). The Reemergence of 'Emergence'. Philosophy of Science 3 (September):S63-S75.
I. Pitowsky (1996). Laplace's Demon Consults an Oracle: The Computational Complexity of Prediction. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B 27 (2):161-180.
Andrew Kenneth Jorgensen (2009). Holism, Communication, and the Emergence of Public Meaning: Lessons From an Economic Analogy. Philosophia 37 (1):133-147.
Richard Green (1995). The Thwarting of Laplace's Demon: Arguments Against the Mechanistic World-View. St. Martin's Press.
Terence E. Horgan (1984). Supervenience and Cosmic Hermeneutics. Southern Journal of Philosophy Supplement 22 (S1):19-38.
Joel Walmsley (2010). Emergence and Reduction in Dynamical Cognitive Science. New Ideas in Psychology 28:274-282.
Robert L. Klee (1984). Microdeterminism and Concepts of Emergence. Philosophy of Science 51 (March):44-63.
John D. Collier & Scott J. Muller (1998). The Dynamical Basis of Emergence in Natural Hierarchies. In G. L. Farre & T. Oksala (eds.), Emergence, Complexity, Hierarchy, Organization, Selected and Edited Papers From the Echo Iii Conference. Acta Polytechnica Scandinavica.
Robert C. Bishop (2003). On Separating Predictability and Determinism. Erkenntnis 58 (2):169--88.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads51 ( #20,516 of 549,068 )Recent downloads (6 months)4 ( #19,186 of 549,068 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
