Emergence Theories and Pragmatic Realism

Essays in Philosophy 3 (2):143-176 (2002)
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Abstract

The tradition of pragmatism has, especially since Dewey, been characterized by a commitment to nonreductive naturalism. The notion of emergence, popular in the early decades of the twentieth century and currently re-emerging as a central concept in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, may be useful in explicating that commitment. The present paper discusses the issue of the reality of emergent properties, drawing particular attention to a pragmatic way of approaching this issue. The reality of emergents can be defended as a pragmatically-useful ontological commitment; hence, pragmatism can be employed as a tool in the debate over the structure and reality of emergence. This strategy of justifying ontological commitments is examined through historical and systematic discussions of the pragmatist tradition. It turns out, among other things, that while classical pragmatists did not specify any technical notion of emergence in the contemporary sense, their non-reductively naturalist views are relevant to the more recent emergence discussions -- especially because they rejected the metaphysical realism typical of today’s ontologically-oriented emergence theories.

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Sami Pihlström
University of Helsinki

Citations of this work

Semiosis as an Emergent Process.Joao Queiroz & Charbel Nino El-Hani - 2006 - Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42 (1):78-116.
Emergence.Robert Michael Francescotti - 2007 - Erkenntnis 67 (1):47 - 63.
Pragmatism and Emergentism.Andrea Parravicini - 2019 - European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 11 (2).

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References found in this work

Philosophical Investigations.Ludwig Wittgenstein - 1953 - New York, NY, USA: Wiley-Blackwell. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe.
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.William James - 2019 - Gorham, ME: Timely Classics in Education. Edited by Eric C. Sheffield.
Supervenience and mind: selected philosophical essays.Jaegwon Kim - 1993 - New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
Mental Events.Donald Davidson - 2001 - In Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 207-224.

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