ProtoSociology

Volume 39, 2022

Physicalism, or Something Near Enough

A Critique of Kim’s Case That Classical Metaphysical Emergence is Incoherent

Jaegwon Kim, in “‘Supervenient and Yet Not Deducible’: Is There a Coherent Concept of Ontological Emergence?” (2009), attempts to show that C.D. Broad’s conception of metaphysical emergence is incoherent. I argue that Kim’s attempt fails because he fails to recognize that trans-ordinal laws, in Broad’s sense, are supposed to be ontologically fundamental laws. Broad’s conception of metaphysical emergence is coherent, though it is another issue (one I do not address here) whether anything in fact answers to it.