PHIL 302: EMERGENCE AS AN EPLANATORY CATEGORY

FINAL ESSAY TOPICS

Write an essay on, or inspired by, (perhaps just a part of) one of the following topics, to be submitted by Wednesday, April 9th, 4:00 PM, to the instructor’s Philosophy Department mailbox. It will be worth 40% of your final grade. The main body of the text should be preceded by an abstract, marked as such, and written in italics, indicating in a few sentences what your paper is about, the main line(s) of argument or conclusion(s). Paper length should be in the neighborhood of 3000-3600 words of main text, or about 10-12 pages. (Please try not to exceed 4000 words including references and citations.) If for some reason you anticipate not being able to meet the deadline, you must notify the instructor in advance – the sooner the better -- giving your reasons. Since this course does not have a final exam, my final grades are due on the following Wednesday (April 16^th). Papers cannot be accepted close to or beyond that date without appropriate documentation such as to justify a grade of DE. The same rules still apply for proper citation of sources.

1. Explain and critically assess the idea of ‘emergent explanation’ as elaborated by Mark Bedau and especially Andy Clarke, tracking it with respect to such by now familiar distinctions as ‘weak’ vs ‘strong’ emergence, and ‘ontological’ vs. ‘epistemic’ emergence. What is or might be ontological about emergent explanation? What is or might be epistemic about it? What makes emergent explanation explanatory? Does it have to be just one or the other? What makes it emergent? What makes it useful? [Readings: Hempel, Bedau, Clarke, Chalmers, Dennett]

2. What is Daniel Heard’s ‘new problem for ontological emergence’? How is it connected to questions about the indispensable epistemic role of mathematics, (of self-organisation, phase transitions, or other ‘universalities’) or maybe functional analysis, in emergent explanations? How important is it to the explanatory force of emergent explanations that ‘emergent predicates’ are taken to accurately pick out concrete emergent properties of the system whose behavior is being explained, as opposed to abstract, idealized conditions, ‘patterns’, objectively satisfied to some salient degree by the system? Is there nothing concrete about the system in virtue of which the pattern is there? Or doesn’t that matter? [Readings: Fodor, Heard, Chalmers, Dennett, Pincock, Crutchfield, Batterman, Morrison]

3. Terrence Deacon has recently developed a complex and novel account of emergent phenomena (or is it just a novel spin on something older?), appealing to a notion of “constraint”, which can perhaps be seen as a close descendent of Polanyi’s earlier appeal to “boundary conditions”. Dynamic hierarchical causal structures or causal topologies of a certain sort (“self-constituting”) play a key role in its elaboration and in its capacity to model physical, biological and mental emergence. Briefly elaborate and explain its core features. Then find something interesting about it to focus on and critically assess it. [Readings: Polanyi, Deacon and Cashman, Deacon, Dennett’s review of Deacon, Kauffman]

PHILOSOPHY 302: EMERGENCE AS AN EXPLANATORY CONCEPT

ASSIGNMENT #2

Write an essay of about 1500 words and no more than 1800 words – i.e., roughly 5 double-spaced pages and no more than roughly 6 double-spaced pages long – on one of the following topics. It is due in class on Friday, March 14th, and will be worth 25% of your final grade. No handwritten assignments, please, and no vinyl folders. Just staple your numbered pages together in the upper left hand corner, making sure that your full name and student id# appear at the top. The main body of the paper should be preceded by an abstract, single spaced, in italics, and just a few sentences long, which clearly and succinctly says what the paper is about, identifying its main conclusions. Try to restrict your exegesis and setting-up moves to approximately the first half, saving the rest for critical discussion or one or two points of your own that you wish to develop, or questions that you wish to raise. Make sure that credit is given, in proper footnotes, to any sources or ideas other than your own, including direct and indirect quotations. Plagiarism is a serious offence, and, depending on the circumstances, can result in getting 0% on a plagiarized assignment, failure in the course, or even expulsion from your university program. Lateness policy: 2% off for each regular school day late. No paper will be accepted after the bulk of them have been returned – hopefully in class on Friday March 21^st -- without a documented excuse (e.g., a doctor’s note).

1. Emergence in Recent Philosophy of Mind. Readings: Kim, “How properties Emerge” (Text, ch. 7); [Background: Kim, “The Non-Reductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation” (Text, ch. 21)]; Humphreys, “How Properties Emerge” (Text, ch. 8). Question: Kim is famous for arguing that traditional accounts of emergent properties are incoherent when conjoined with a commitment to those properties being the ground of new causal powers. Humphreys proposes to undermine this line of argument by arguing against its assumption of the (‘strong’) supervenience of emergent properties on their underlying lower level basis, by developing a model on which this would be false. Explain and then critically discuss.

2. Emergence in Biology. Readings: Michael Polanyi “Life’s Irreducible Structure” (scanned copy e-mailed); [Background: Philip W. Anderson, “More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science” (Text, ch. 10)]; Philip W. Anderson, Daniel Stein, “Broken Symmetry, Emergent Properties, Dissipative Structures, Life. Are They Related?” (scanned copy e-mailed)); Stuart Kauffman “Antichaos and Adaptation” (scanned copy e-mailed) . Question: You may focus on just one of the 3 main readings or you may compare or contrast a couple of them. For instance, you might wish to evaluate the role the notion of information plays in Polanyi’s argument for the emergence of life. Or you might compare and contrast the concepts of emergence as respectively appealed to by Polanyi and in Kauffman. Or you might focus on what is distinctive about Kauffmann’s appeal to self-organisation in his bid to develop models for the emergence of life. You might contrast it , say, with just the appeal to causal factors, or with for instance ‘analytical functionalism’s’ appeal to prescriptive functional definitions of mental state types in terms just of their causal role in the cognitive economy of the cogniser.

3. Emergence in Physics. Readings: “More is Different…”, Anderson (see above); [Background: “Emergence in Physics”, Robert W. Batterman, Routlledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (on-line)]; “Multiple Realizability and Universality” Robert W. Batterman, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51 (2000) pp. 115-145; “Emergent Physics and Micro-Ontology,” Margaret Morrison, Philosophy of Science 79 (January 2012) pp. 141-166. [This latter paper is quite technical in spots but nevertheless has valuable insights that are accessible without having to have fully grasped those technicalities.] Question: Never mind the inter-disciplinary hierarchical structure of science – physics at the base, and then chemistry, biology, psychology…, and the layered hierarchical structure of the natural order that this may seem to represent. Physics per se has its own intra-disciplinary hierarchical structure, and many see certain macro-physical phenomena – e.g. properties that appear as result of certain ‘phase transitions’ -- as exhibiting emergence at the macro-physical level, and furthermore in a way that can be explained by appeal to mathematical ‘limit principles’ that reveal a universality to the structure of all such phase transitions that is importantly independent of microphysical causal details. So these phase transitional phenomena appear to be explainable independently of the details of underlying micro-physical constitution, and so in that sense explainable non-reductively. Explore and discuss.