Abstract
The chapter discusses the three intertwined notions central to Mario Bunge’s thought, emergence, systems and mechanism. It draws lines that contact or diverge from his counterparts and wider uses in recent philosophical work. Bunge’s status as an early pioneer of the systemic approach, emergence and mechanismic explanation means that his work may be fruitfully supplemented or complemented by these recent advances. The chapter then moves on to discuss Bunge’s philosophy of technology as the additional central theme in his overall opus. His insistence on technology being inherently philosophical, as technophilosophy, and his related thesis, technoethics, are further analyzed and expanded upon. It is proposed that along with neurons, at the physical level, and what Bunge has dubbed “psychons” at the level of the mental, there may be a notion of “technon” at the emerging level of modern technological convergence.
In general, systemic issues call for systemic and long-term solutions, not sectoral and near-sighted measures. This is the practical message of systemism
Bunge (2004a, p. 190)
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Notes
- 1.
‘Mechnanismic’ is the adjective preferred by Bunge distinguishing his theory from classical mechanistic or mechanical ones.
- 2.
A system is said to have a mechanism essential to it denoting its specific function; or the essential mechanism of a given system is the totality of processes that occur exclusively in that system and its conspecifics (Bunge 2004a, p. 193). In general, no concrete system lacks a mechanism, unlike conceptual or semiotic systems that may do.
- 3.
- 4.
Standing for Composition, Environment, Structure Mechanism
- 5.
The same point will concern us in the next section when we introduce the methodological credentials of analytical sociology’s mechanisms: it is basically the same venerable problem of the whole impacting on the part.
- 6.
In his (1979a, p. 29), Bunge makes clear that the precursors of a system giving rise to an emergent entity do not blend but “keep their individuality to some extent”. The latter qualification is obviously unclear.
- 7.
This is for instance something more obviously appreciated, i.e. the totally non-predicable novelty of ethical issues arising in the case of human enhancement and transhumanism as I have argued in several places, more recently Kaldis (2018)
- 8.
Work is being done on this and guarded satisfaction with modeling and mechanisms leads to fine-tuning that is a welcoming balance to the opposite hype.
- 9.
This will be the case if they are simply higher level properties of the same qualitative kind, that is aggregative sums of the same kind extensionally understood, or even if intensionally different, but not radically new or entirely unpredictable properties.
- 10.
A dissenting voice is that of Pierre Demeleunaere who in his Introduction to his edited volume rejects the idea that mechanism-based explanations necessarily involve macro-entities which are to be considered higher or emergent or robustly systemic so that they obey the tenets of emergence: i.e. robust novelty that cannot be explained by constituent parts (Demeleunaere 2011, pp. 23–24).
- 11.
On early social ontology in the wake of systems theory, see Bunge (1974); systemism is a later version building on this.
- 12.
For a proposed taxonomy of mechanisms into kinds that significantly alters how the New Mechanism or New Mechanical Philosophy is to be understood see Levy (2013). For an overview of mechanisms used in recent social-scientific explanation see Ylikoski (2018). For Bunge’s canonical view on explanation and mechanism see Bunge (1997).
- 13.
Strictly speaking their special subject matter involves in the classic Fodorian sense the existence of special kinds (e.g. social, like markets and their functioning) connected by means of lawful regularities which can be bona fide special laws of that separate science due to the multiple physical realizability of these special (higher) kinds by their basal physical causal links – i.e. same special effect (economic or psychological) but different physical ways to achieve it. Hence the non-reducibility of special properties or entities to the physical ones underpinning them, i.e. there exists a type non-identity.
- 14.
The homogeneous use of mechanisms (along with the attendant systemic paradigm) ensures what Bunge preaches as convergence. It is these two major instruments that build converging patterns of scientific disciplines.
- 15.
Bunge’s criticism of computationalism in the past is out of date I think. And so is its anti-neural networks position. Both can safely be ignored in our attempt at a synthesis. Contemporary attempts at brain-like computing would meet with his approval. See for some fruitful cases illustrating such novel type of work e.g. on biologically motivated computer vision Bülthoff et al. (2002), or on brain informatics Yao et al. (2010), on computer vision Cipolla et al. (2013). These are all cases where computer programs carry the burden of revealing the underlying mechanisms. In the past Bunge has attacked artificial life (in its strong version) and has claimed that in the case of computer simulations we must distinguish between program simulation and process simulated, an imitation from what is imitated, and borrows the formulation that however life-like a simulation becomes after a certain degree of perfection it does not become a realization of life itself (Mahner and Bunge 1997, p. 152) Of course brain-like computing does not claim to realize life if that is meant to hold as a type identity.
- 16.
A case in point is this: “In most networks, however, there are multiple routes between two nodes, and thus the probability increases with each additional path. This increase is roughly additive if the paths are independent, and is also a key reason that multiple connectivity increases social cohesion” (Moody 2009, p. 456).
- 17.
Their structure can be endostructure whereby their internal arrangement is given or exostructure that describes a system’s relation(s) to its surrounding context or environment.
- 18.
- 19.
Elder-Vass (2010, pp. 60–62) – in what is effectively the venerable conundrum about structure and agency – offers a vague claim marred by unhelpful ambivalence about the whole impacting on the parts and the latter on the whole or both the higher or composite entity – a star – and its lower level particles are simultaneously causally efficacious a claim that explains really nothing. Philip Pettit offers a rather fanciful explanation of how to account for whole-part non-causal relations by means of a model of levels of programming properties whereby the higher level holistic properties program for the individual ones that cause the actual event – i.e. emergent properties non-causally ensuring (or programming) the instantiating ones but without remaining epiphenomenal – see Macdonald and Macdonald (2010, pp 160–165)
- 20.
Nanotechnology, a technology or rather technoscience that bears explicitly on the need for mechanism as essential to understanding reality as is championed by Bunge is curiously not mentioned by him as a central case, as far as I know.
- 21.
This simplified view of technology as applied science is now dropped (see Bunge 2017) though retaining the initial idea about artifacts as things being morally neutral. (but see below this section and Bunge (2003b) (originally published in 1979) where it is acknowledged that methodologically there is no difference between scientific and technological research ibid., p. 174) A criticism of the always lurking naïve view separating applied from pure science is that as I have explained above modern scientific work is done in a novel way, employing models that are meant to reveal hidden mechanisms and unobservables, So – contra Bunge – I would claim that (a) engaging in such modelling as pure science is already fraught with moral decisions and normative judgments – even for deciding to do it to begin with and (b) the line between pure science and applied is now heavily blurred as a result of such computer modelling. So Bunge’s view is untenable even on the basis of the use of explanatory mechanisms and their application(s) that he himself values so much. And (c) the view of technology as applied science is not true to his systemism and he must thus abandon it in the interest of self-consistency.
- 22.
Though Bunge champions mechanimsic explanation along with his systems view that both together countenance anti-reductionism and anti-individualism, he asserts, (e.g. Bunge 1977, p. 97) that unlike mechanism which is reductionist, his emergentist view requires properties of wholes to be novel (not had by their constituent parts – see logical notation above) and not simply hereditary or resultant – as he calls those properties that result by aggregation of the same tokens thereof had by their components. This is no inconsistency on his part. He has a novel, anti-reductionist, view of mechanism not to be confused with the classical one he puts aside. This divergence of Bunge’s thought from classical mechanism and its attendant reductionism is important for understanding him.
- 23.
This less than thought-through position leads him to embracing less interesting positions in the moral assessment of science and technology: scientists are innocent knowledge-seekers working for the sake of knowledge, technology as applied science can be good or evil (Bunge 1988). It has recently become clear that this view is not espoused any more in its earlier simplified form (Bunge 2017).
- 24.
However in Bunge (2003a, p. 86), he tacitly brings to light the hybrid nature of the outputs of designing artifacts whereby scientific theory merged with engineering or design, psychiatry with pharmacology and so forth – thereby admitting that technology is no mere applied science or denying that there is a schism between theory and practice in technological designing (if he insists in calling it applied science he at least adds the qualification ‘multidisciplinary’ now).
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Kaldis, B. (2019). Emergence, Systems and Technophilosophy. In: Matthews, M.R. (eds) Mario Bunge: A Centenary Festschrift. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16673-1_40
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