Part III of the book focuses on reconstructing the scientific emergentism of writers like Anderson, Freeman, Laughlin, Prigogine, and others, and providing a theoretical framework for its claims. I argue that scientific emergentism is a philosophically overlooked, and profoundly important position, that I dub ‘Mutualism’ with a range of novel …
The widespread philosophical view is that reductionism in the sciences is a dead view and perhaps slightly distasteful to boot. As I outlined in an earlier post, the received view assumes that “reductionism” is semantic, or Nagelian, reduction. The goal of such semantic reduction was to show that higher sciences …
Understanding the nature of “vertical” relations whether in science, nature, mathematics, logic, or anywhere else, is a hot topic in philosophy. What is unfortunate is that, as yet, too little attention is paid to focused issues about what frameworks work best for the “vertical” relations in particular areas. However, it …
Part I of the book clears space for later work and supplies a key theoretical platform. To get us started, I briefly sketch the outlines of the scientific views to highlight how they differ from philosophical accounts of reduction /emergence; and to broach a diagnosis of how the dislocation between …
Many thanks to John Schwenkler for allowing me to blog here about my new book Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy. The book is long, so I will seek to unpack the main themes of the book’s four sections in subsequent posts. At the end of this post, I …
With the Minds Online conference now in the rearview mirror we are back to regular programming here at Brains, including two upcoming journal symposia and visits from the authors of several new and forthcoming books: Beginning tomorrow, Tuesday 10/11, Carl Gillett will blog for several days about his book Reduction and Emergence in …
Joëlle Proust invited me to share a link to a conference she organized recently in Paris on “Metacognitive Diversity Across Cultures: Advances and Perspectives”. The page includes video recordings of all the main talks, including keynote addresses by Asher Coriat and Chris Frith. There is also a talk by Joëlle that touches …
