In this paper I argue that the ontological interpretation of the concepts of reduction and emergence is often misleading in the philosophy of science and should nearly always be eschewed in favor of an epistemological interpretation. As a paradigm case, an example is drawn from the philosophy of chemistry to illustrate the drawbacks of “ontological reduction” and “ontological emergence,” and the virtues of an epistemological interpretation of these concepts.

In this article an epistemological framework is proposed in order to integrate the emergentist thought with systemic studies on biological autonomy, which are focused on the role of organization. Particular attention will be paid to the role of the observer’s activity, especially: (a) the different operations he performs in order to identify the pertinent elements at each descriptive level, and (b) the relationships between the different models he builds from them. According to the approach sustained here, organization will be (...) considered as the result of a specific operation of identification of the relational properties of the functional components of a system, which do not necessarily coincide with the intrinsic properties of its structural constituents. Also, an epistemological notion of emergence—that of “complex emergence”—will be introduced, which can be defined as the insufficiency, even in principle, of a single descriptive modality to provide a complete description of certain classes of systems. This integrative framework will allow us to deal with two issues in biological and emergentist studies: (1) distinguishing the autonomy proper of living systems from some physical processes like those of structural stability and pattern generation, and (2) reconsidering the notion of downward causation not as a direct or indirect influence of the whole on its parts, but instead as an epistemological problem of interaction between descriptive domains in which the concept of organization proposed and the observational operations related to it play a crucial role. (shrink)

In this book, Arnold Davidson elaborates a method for considering the history of concepts and the nature of scientific knowledge, a method he calls "historical epistemology." He applies this to the history of sexuality, with consequences for our understanding of desire, abnormality, and sexuality.

Top-down synthetic biology makes partly synthetic cells by redesigning simple natural forms of life, and bottom-up synthetic biology aims to make fully synthetic cells using only entirely nonliving components. Within synthetic biology the notions of complexity and emergence are quite controversial, but the imprecision of key notions makes the discussion inconclusive. I employ a precise notion of weak emergent property, which is a robust characteristic of the behavior of complex bottom-up causal webs, where a complex causal web is one (...) that is incompressible and its behavior cannot be derived except by crawling through all of the gory details of the interactions in the web. The central thesis of this article is that synthetic biology centrally is the activity of engineering the desired weak emergent properties of synthetic cells. Synthetic biology has many different ways to engineer desired weak emergent properties of synthetic cells, including Edisonian trial and error, standardized parts, refactoring, and reprogramming synthetic genomes. The article ends by noting two philosophical consequences of engineering weak emergence. One is epistemological: synthesis is crucial for discovering weak emergent properties. The other is metaphysical: simple life forms are nothing but complex chemical mechanisms. (shrink)

In this article, I examine Luhmann’s, Bunge’s and others’ views on emergence, and argue that Luhmann’s epistemological construal of emergence in terms of Totalausschluss (total exclusion) is both ontologically flawed and detrimental to an appropriate understanding of the distinctive features of social emergence. By contrast, Bunge’s rational emergentism, his CESM model, and Wimsatt’s characterization of emergence as nonaggregativity provide a useful framework to investigate emergence. While researchers in the field of social theory and sociology (...) tend to regard Luhmann as the sole representative of systems theory, the latter has been characterized by its diversity, and the writings of such systems theorists as Mario Bunge deserve more (critical) attention from social researchers than they receive at present. Finally, this article suggests that the perennial debate over methodological individualism and holism in social science may make real progress if such ambiguous terms as reduction and reductionism are elucidated before they are employed. (shrink)

In this article, I examine Luhmann’s, Bunge’s and others’ views on emergence, and argue that Luhmann’s epistemological construal of emergence in terms of Totalausschluss (total exclusion) is both ontologically flawed and detrimental to an appropriate understanding of the distinctive features of social emergence. By contrast, Bunge’s rational emergentism, his CESM model, and Wimsatt’s characterization of emergence as nonaggregativity provide a useful framework to investigate emergence. While researchers in the field of social theory and sociology (...) tend to regard Luhmann as the sole representative of systems theory, the latter has been characterized by its diversity, and the writings of such systems theorists as Mario Bunge deserve more (critical) attention from social researchers than they receive at present. Finally, this article suggests that the perennial debate over methodological individualism and holism in social science may make real progress if such ambiguous terms as reduction and reductionism are elucidated before they are employed. (shrink)

This paper provides an introduction to the history of the concept of “emerging infectious diseases” (EID) and reflects on how humanities and social science scholars have interacted with it. It starts with a chronological outline of the coinage of the concept in the early 1990s in the wake of the shocks provoked by Ebola and HIV/AIDS, which disrupted the idea that the West was transitioning from a period of infectious diseases to one of chronic diseases. We argue that humanities and (...) social science scholars in disciplines such as history, anthropology, STS, and literature studies have critically explored the concept, showing how entrenched it was in the perceptions of the US and Europe about threats posed by the rest of the globe. Moreover, we explore how scholars in the humanities have used the EID concept to comment on contemporary realities and mobilized it to create dialogues with scientists, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Subsequently, we explore how the growing contemporary interest in EID has pushed historians to research the ontological and epistemological factors that enabled the “emergence” of diseases long before the invention of the EID concept, such as plague, Chagas disease, and sleeping sickness, as well as the factors that transformed these and other emerging diseases into pandemics. We conclude by outlining a few neglected factors in the EID literature that could be addressed: the circulation and reception of the concept outside of the West, the examination of EID as a problem for wild animals and not just for humans, and global histories of disease emergence as an epistemological and social process. (shrink)

In modern, Western societies the purpose of schooling is to ensure that school-goers acquire knowledge of pre-existing practices, events, entities and so on. The knowledge that is learned is then tested to see if the learner has acquired a correct or adequate understanding of it. For this reason, it can be argued that schooling is organised around a representational epistemology: one which holds that knowledge is an accurate representation of something that is separate from knowledge itself. Since the object of (...) knowledge is assumed to exist separately from the knowledge itself, this epistemology can also be considered ‘spatial.’ In this paper we show how ideas from complexity have challenged the spatial epistemology’ of representation and we explore possibilities for an alternative ‘temporal’ understanding of knowledge in its relationship to reality. In addition to complexity, our alternative takes its inspiration from Deweyan ‘transactional realism’ and deconstruction. We suggest that ‘knowledge’ and ‘reality’ should not be understood as separate systems which somehow have to be brought into alignment with each other, but that they are part of the same emerging complex system which is never fully ‘present’ in any (discrete) moment in time. This not only introduces the notion of time into our understanding of the relationship between knowledge and reality, but also points to the importance of acknowledging the role of the ‘unrepresentable’ or ‘incalculable’. With this understanding knowledge reaches us not as something we receive but as a response, which brings forth new worlds because it necessarily adds something (which was not present anywhere before it appeared) to what came before. This understanding of knowledge suggests that the acquisition of curricular content should not be considered an end in itself. Rather, curricular content should be used to bring forth that which is incalculable from the perspective of the present. The epistemology of emergence therefore calls for a switch in focus for curricular thinking, away from questions about presentation and representation and towards questions about engagement and response. (shrink)

This paper introduces an alternative approach to innovation: Emergent Innovation. As opposed to radical innovation Emergent Innovation finds a balance and integrates the demand both for radically new knowledge and at the same time for an organic development from within the organization. From a knowledge management perspective one can boil down this problem to the question of how to cope with the new and with profound change in knowledge. This question will be dealt with in the first part of the (...) paper. As an implication the alternative approach of Emergent Innovation will be presented in the second part: this approach looks at innovation as a socio-epistemological process of “learning from the future”. Keywords: Innovation, radical innovation, emergent innovation, knowledge creation, change. (shrink)

Spacetime functionalism is the view that spacetime is a functional structure implemented by a more fundamental ontology. Lam and Wüthrich have recently argued that spacetime functionalism helps to solve the epistemological problem of empirical coherence in quantum gravity and suggested that it also (dis)solves the hard problem of spacetime, namely the problem of offering a picture consistent with the emergence of spacetime from a non-spatio-temporal structure. First, I will deny that spacetime functionalism solves the hard problem by showing (...) that it comes in various species, each entailing a different attitude towards, or answer to, the hard problem. Second, I will argue that the existence of an explanatory gap, which grounds the hard problem, has not been correctly taken into account in the literature. (shrink)

(1996). Islamic responses to emerging scientific, technological and epistemological transformations. Social Epistemology: Vol. 10, Islamic Social Epistemology, pp. 331-349. doi: 10.1080/02691729608578823.

In this paper we want to analyze some philosophical and epistemological connections between a new kind of technology recently developed within robotics, and the previous mechanical approach. A new paradigm about machine-design in robotics, currently defined as ‘Embodied Intelligence’, has recently been developed. Here we consider the debate on the relationship between the hand and the intellect, from the perspective of the history of philosophy, aiming at providing a more suitable understanding of this paradigm. The new bottom-up approach to (...) design is deeply rooted in a new kind of empiricism, which tries to overcome issues connected with the previous approach strongly committed with the Artificial Intelligence (AI) debate and its origin. Since Turing’s time, the AI debate showed a rationalistic bias which remained undisputed until now. The paradigm shift we are witnessing nowadays is a reply to that bias in order to achieve not only a better way to design robots, but also to understand some underlying epistemological remarks. (shrink)

Root, branch, and blossom, attention is intertwined with epistemology. It is essential to our capacity to learn and decisive of the evidence we obtain, it influences the intellectual connections we forge and those we remember, and it is the cognitive tool whereby we enact decisions about inquiry. Moreover, because it is both an epistemic practice and a site of agency, attention is a natural locus for questions about epistemic morality. This article surveys the emerging epistemology of attention, reviewing the existing (...) literature and sketching avenues for future investigation. It also argues for a reorientation of epistemology itself. This argument is the focus of Section 1. Section 2 briefly reviews philosophical accounts of attention, Section 3 focuses on issues in traditional, individualistic epistemology, and Section 4 turns to social epistemology. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Knowledge and Representation Education as a Re/Presentational Practice Complexity's Challenge to Representation Complexity's Challenge to Presentation Implications for Schooling Notes References.

In this paper I explore Phyllis Rooney’s 2003 chapter, “Feminist Epistemology and Naturalized Epistemology: An Uneasy Alliance,” taking guidance from her critique of naturalized epistemology in pursuing my own analysis of another uneasy alliance: that between feminist epistemology and social epistemology. Investigating some of the background assumptions at work in prominent conceptions of social epistemology, I consider recent analyses of "epistemic bubbles" to ask how closely such analyses are aligned with ongoing research in feminist epistemology. I argue that critical feminist (...) insights in political philosophy are called for here, especially those that focus on multiple politically salient relationships and also emphasize practices of personal transformation as inseparably bound up with broader movements for social transformation. Insofar as feminist epistemology continues to carry another world in its heart, I argue that it will continue to rest uneasily with any effort to align it with—let alone subsume it within—the still emerging field of social epistemology. (shrink)

이 글의 목적은 부르디외의 ‘하비투스’ 개념에 제기되는 결정론의 의혹을 ‘기호적 창발’의 구조로 완화함으로써, 상징권력의 구조에 관한 자연주의적 탐구의 가능성을 제안하는 데 있다. 부르디외의 상징권력에는 하비투스의 이중성 즉, ‘구조화하는 구조’와 ‘구조화된 구조’의 논리가 내재되어 있는데, 그 이중성은 증여와 언어교환의 경험을 통해 확인될 수 있다. 그러나 하비투스의 이중적인 실천 논리가 함축하는 구조적 제약성과 그 작용 과정의 불투명성으로 인해, 아처나 킹과 같은 사회학자들은 부르디외의 사회학이 여전히 결정론 또는 유물론의 시각을 보여 준다고 분석한다. 이 문제에 필자는 하비투스의 제약성은 ‘몸’을 가진 유기체가 세계와 상호작용함으로써 반복적으로 (...) 경험하는 패턴들을 구조화하는 과정에서 드러나는 유연한 도식이라고 밝힌다. 이 글은 그 해명의 과정을 체험주의의 ‘영상도식’과 ‘기호적 창발’의 구조로 밝혀, 부르디외의 하비투스 개념에 제기되는 결정론에 대한 의혹을 완화하고, 상징권력에 관한 자연주의적인 탐구의 가능성을 보인다. (shrink)

A rigorous, authoritative new anthology which brings together some of the most significant contemporary scholarship on the theory of knowledge Carefully-calibrated and judiciously-curated, this strong and contemporary new anthology builds upon Epistemology: An Anthology, Second Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2008) by drawing a concise and well-balanced selection of higher-level readings from a large, diverse, and evolving body of research. Includes 17 readings that represent a broad and vital part of contemporary epistemology, including articles by female philosophers and emerging thought leaders Organized (...) into seven thoughtful and distinct sections, including virtue epistemology, practical reasons for belief, and epistemic dysfunctions among others Designed to sit alongside the highly-successful anthology of canonical essays, Epistemology: An Anthology, Second Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2008) Edited by a distinguished editorial team, including Ernie Sosa, one of the most influential active epistemologists Highlights cutting edge methodologies and contemporary topics for advanced students, instructors, and researchers. (shrink)

If consciousness emerges into ontological reality at some point in nature, as system complexity increases, then it also ‘submerges’ at some adjoining point, as structures simplify. This has led some to posit a ‘latent-consciousness’ in what Bohr saw as the consciousness-like spontaneity of quantum phenomena. Yet to move on this basis to Whitehead's ontological pan-experientialism or to direct quantum explanations of consciousness faces serious epistemological limitations -- perhaps being more unwittingly projective than genuinely explanatory. More reasonable would be an (...) epistemological pan- experientialism in the sense of the later James. Consciousness, as the ultimate lens and medium of all knowledge, is inseparable from the physical reality it would know, especially at the very limits of empirical observation in microphysics. ‘Submerged’ consciousness is better understood in Jamesian pragmatic terms than via assumed but unprovable ontologies. (shrink)

Weak emergence is the view that a system’s macro properties can be explained by its micro properties but only in an especially complicated way. This paper explains a version of weak emergence based on the notion of explanatory incompressibility and “crawling the causal web.” Then it examines three reasons why weak emergence might be thought to be just in the mind. The first reason is based on contrasting mere epistemological emergence with a form of ontological (...) emergence that involves irreducible downward causation. The second reason is based on the idea that attributions of emergence are always a reflection of our ignorance of non-emergent explanations. The third reason is based on the charge that complex explanations are anthropocentric. Rather than being just in the mind, weak emergence is seen to involve a distinctive kind of complex, macro-pattern in the mind-independent objective micro-causal structure that exists in nature. The paper ends by addressing two further questions. One concerns whether weak emergence applies only or mainly to computer simulations and computational systems. The other concerns the respect in which weak emergence is dynamic rather than static. (shrink)

In a world of appalling social inequalities people are becoming more aware of the multiple dimensions of injustice, whether social, political, cultural, sexual, ethnic, religious, historical, or ecological. Rarely acknowledged is another vital dimension: cognitive injustice, the failure to recognize the different ways of knowing by which people across the globe run their lives and provide meaning to their existence. This book shows why cognitive injustice underlies all the other dimensions; global social justice is not possible without global cognitive justice. (...) Santos s argument unfolds in two inquiries. No matter how internally diverse, Western Modernity provided the knowledge underlying the long cycle of colonialism followed by global capitalism. These historical processes profoundly devalued and marginalized the knowledge and wisdom that had been in existence in the global South. Today, working against epistemicide is imperative in order to recover and valorize the epistemological diversity of the world. Such recovery and valorization is the book s second inquiry and is based on four key analytical tools: sociology of absences, sociology of emergences, ecology of knowledges, and intercultural translation. The transformation of the world s epistemological diversity into an empowering instrument against hegemonic globalization points to a new kind of bottom-up cosmopolitanism. It would promote a wide conversation of humankind, celebrating conviviality, solidarity, and life against the logic of market-ridden greed and individualism and the destruction of life to which world populations large and small are condemned by the dominant forces of globalization. --Provided by publisher. (shrink)

What is the mission of epistemology, and what is its proper methodology? Such meta-epistemological questions have been prominent in recent years, especially with the emergence of various brands of "naturalistic" epistemology. In this paper, I shall reformulate and expand upon my own meta-epistemological conception (most fully articulated in Goldman, 1986), retaining many of its former ingredients while reconfiguring others. The discussion is by no means confined, though, to the meta-epistemological level. New substantive proposals will also be (...) advanced and defended. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: The Problem of Emergence and Reduction The Varieties of Reductionism: Ontological and Epistemological The Reduction and Emergence Debate Today: Specific Cases Seeming to Warrant the Label of Ontological or Epistemological Emergence Questions for Future Research.

David Wallace argues that we should take quantum theory seriously as an account of what the world is like--which means accepting the idea that the universe is constantly branching into new universes. He presents an accessible but rigorous account of the 'Everett interpretation', the best way to make coherent sense of quantum physics.

Disasters change how we understand the world, and in doing so they can accelerate social movements that drive long-term change. This book uses social epistemology to chart how disaster experiences change us, how current systems harm us by shutting down that change, and how we can reform disaster practices to better adjust to our future crises.

We survey and clarify some recent appearances of the term ‘emergence’. We distinguish epistemological emergence, which is merely a limitation of descriptive apparatus, from ontological emergence, which should involve causal features of a whole system not reducible to the properties of its parts, thus implying the failure of part/whole reductionism and of mereological supervenience for that system. Are there actually any plausible cases of the latter among the numerous and various mentions of ‘emergence’ in the (...) recent literature? Quantum mechanics seems to offer one, in the Bell properties of entangled particles, but other apparently promising candidates, such as non‐linear dynamical systems investigated by complexity studies and chaos theory, seem on careful analysis to display only epistemological emergence. We examine the consequences for physicalism of admitting ontological emergence in the micro‐physical. (shrink)

It has been standard philosophical practice in analytic philosophy to employ intuitions generated in response to thought-experiments as evidence in the evaluation of philosophical claims. In part as a response to this practice, an exciting new movement—experimental philosophy—has recently emerged. This movement is unified behind both a common methodology and a common aim: the application of methods of experimental psychology to the study of the nature of intuitions. In this paper, we will introduce two different views concerning the relationship that (...) holds between experimental philosophy and the future of standard philosophical practice (what we call, the proper foundation view and the restrictionist view), discuss some of the more interesting and important results obtained by proponents of both views, and examine the pressure these results put on analytic philosophers to reform standard philosophical practice. We will also defend experimental philosophy from some recent objections, suggest future directions for work in experimental philosophy, and suggest what future lines of epistemological response might be available to those wishing to defend analytic epistemology from the challenges posed by experimental philosophy. (shrink)

There is a long tradition comparing moral knowledge to mathematical knowledge. In this paper, I discuss apparent similarities and differences between knowledge in the two areas, realistically conceived. I argue that many of these are only apparent, while others are less philosophically significant than might be thought. The picture that emerges is surprising. There are definitely differences between epistemological arguments in the two areas. However, these differences, if anything, increase the plausibility of moral realism as compared to mathematical realism. (...) It is hard to see how one might argue, on epistemological grounds, for moral antirealism while maintaining commitment to mathematical realism. But it may be possible to do the opposite. (shrink)

After a long period of neglect, the philosophy of chemistry is slowly being recognized as a newly emerging branch of the philosophy of science. This paper endorses and defends this emergence given the difficulty of reducing all of the philosophical problems raised by chemistry to those already being considered within the philosophy of physics, and recognition that many of the phenomena in chemistry are epistemologically emergent.

Virtue epistemology is a diverse and flourishing field, one of the most exciting developments in epistemology to emerge over the last three decades. Virtue epistemology begins with the premise that epistemology is a normative discipline and, accordingly, a central task of epistemology is to explain the sort of normativity that knowledge, justified belief, and the like involve. A second premise is that a focus on the intellectual virtues is essential to carrying out this central task. This collection offers some of (...) the most influential and agenda-setting work at the heart of virtue epistemology's research program. Taken together, they will equip the reader to enter the ongoing discussion and debate in the field. The selections range from seminal contributions by Ernest Sosa, who introduced the notion of intellectual virtue into the contemporary literature, to a study of "epistemic justice" that draws on _To Kill a Mockingbird_ and The Talented Mr. Ripley. The readings include overviews of the field that also serve to advance the discussion; investigations of the nature of knowledge; reflections on the value of knowledge; examinations of credit and luck; and explorations of future directions for research. The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket. (shrink)

This essay presents arguments for the claim that in the best of all possible worlds (Leibniz) there are sources of unpredictability and creativity for us humans, even given a pancomputational stance. A suggested answer to Chaitin’s questions: “Where do new mathematical and biological ideas come from? How do they emerge?” is that they come from the world and emerge from basic physical (computational) laws. For humans as a tiny subset of the universe, a part of the new ideas comes as (...) the result of the re-configuration and reshaping of already existing elements and another part comes from the outside as a consequence of openness and interactivity of the system. For the universe at large it is randomness that is the source of unpredictability on the fundamental level. In order to be able to completely predict the Universe-computer we would need the Universe-computer itself to compute its next state; as Chaitin already demonstrated there are incompressible truths which means truths that cannot be computed by any other computer but the universe itself. (shrink)

Children are the great omission in theology. The objective of the article is to show that there is a growing realisation of this reality. More than that, there are attempts afoot to salvage the situation by factoring children more and more into theological writing, not in an objectified manner, but as serious agents of theology and, in the case of this article, as agents of mission. A few examples to this effect are shown in the article. The main thrust of (...) the study, however, is to raise the hypothetical question of whether children have not become an important and indispensable theological hermeneutic themselves. The serious question is raised of whether children if, taken seriously in church and theology are not forcing a new epistemological break or a new way of believing and of theologising on the world of mission. A somewhat tentative and hypothetical conclusion is arrived at, which suggests that indeed there is a new rupture occurring in terms of how we know what we know in church and theology. (shrink)

A significant increase in scientific discoveries, made possible, among other things, thanks to the computing power provided by modern information technologies, occurs against the background of the lack of theoretical and methodological resources necessary for their scientific conceptualization. The situation is similar to the one that took place at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and became the object of reflection on the part of philosophers called emergentists. This explains the revival in our time of interest in some (...) of their ideas, including the idea of ontological novelty, which emergent phenomena possess. Modern emergentism is positioned as a realistic teaching that aims to find access to reality in itself, before any knowledge about it, which implies overcoming the correlationism that has dominated philosophy since the time of Kant. One of the representatives of modern emergentism, Manuel DeLanda, tries to combine the position on the ontological novelty of emergent objects with the concept of individuation by Georges Kangilem, which reveals the mechanism of their occurrence and concretization in the form of individual singularities. This requires abandoning the ontology inherited from the ancient Greeks, based on the dialectic of the general and the singular, in favor of an ontology based on individual and universal singularities. The article analyzes the arguments of the supporters of the "new ontology" and concludes that, as in the case of classical emergence, modern discussions are caused by a crisis in physics, which is faced with the fact that the facts recorded during the study of the microcosm are inexplicable from the point of view of the existing theory, and therefore are really ontologically new. But it is possible that with the creation of the" new physics", these facts will cease to be emergent and will pass into the category of "others". (shrink)

A phenomenon “emerges” when a concept is instantiated for the first time: hence emergence is relative to a set of concepts. Propositional thought and language emerge together. It is proposed that the degree of complexity of an object language relative to a given metalanguage can be gauged by the number of ways it can be translated into that metalanguage: in analogy with other forms of measurement, the more ways the object language can be translated into the metalanguage, the less (...) powerful the conceptual resources of the object language. (shrink)

The paper outlines the understanding of emergence in Ontic Structural Realism of James Ladyman (and his co-author Ross). First, the notion of emergence is explored, surveying the various distinctions associated with it (ontological vs. epistemological, diachronic vs. synchronic, weak vs. strong). It turns out that Ross and Ladyman’s notion of emergence is that of weak epistemological emergence compatible with ontic reduction. Particular notions of emergence are associated with the objection embodied in the Generalized (...) Causal Exclusion Argument. The latter is sketched and the solution of Ross and Ladyman is presented: first, in general, the notion of weak emergence is not threatened by this objection. Causal reduction associated with it ensures that there are no competing causal explanations, so no overdetermination arises. Second, there is a peculiar feature of Ross and Ladyman’s theory; namely, there is no causation on the fundamental level, only pattern dynamism. Causation emerges only on higher levels of special sciences. Hence, there is no problem of causal overdetermination. (shrink)

In this essay, I aim to address the two related problems faced by ontological emergence and propose a solution. First, I shall briefly outline the concept of emergence, the distinction between ontological and epistemological emergence, as well as the distinction between synchronic and diachronic emergence, and focus mainly on synchronic ontological emergence. Second, I shall discuss the two related problems faced by synchronic ontological emergence—configurational forces and downward causation. Third, I shall present a (...) solution to these problems—affirming ontological emergence but denying vertical causation. Last, I shall address objections to the ontological emergence without vertical causation view. (shrink)

SummaryStarting with Descartes, epistemology has been almost entirely based on first person knowledge. We must begin, according to the usual story, with what is most certain: knowledge of our own sensations and thoughts. In one way or another we then progress, if we can, to knowledge of an objective external world. There is then the final, tenuous, step to knowledge of other minds.In this paper I argue for a total revision of this picture. All propositional thought, whether positive or skeptical, (...) whether of the inner or of the outer, requires possession of the concept of objective truth, and this concept is accessible only to those creatures in communication with others. Third person knowledge – knowledge of other minds – is thus conceptually basic. But such knowledge is impossible without knowledge of a shared world of objects in a shared time and space. Thus the acquisition of knowledge is not based on a progression from the subjective to the objective; it emerges holistically, and is interpersonal from the start. (shrink)