Kevin, this is a great question and has no easy answer.
Many of the complex dynamical systems folks have argued that "emergence" is
relative to our current state of knowledge; that it only reflects the
limitations of science that we haven't yet discovered the reductionist
explanation. (Herbert Simon and many others state this explicitly and it's
sometimes called "weak emergence".) For example, the 1920s emergentists
thought that the properties of water couldn't be predicted from or reduced
to the properties of hydrogen and oxygen (this was a classic 19th century
example of emergence used by both Mill and Lewes), but the advance of
quantum physics circa 1930 allowed this reduction. But I think your
question gets at something even more profound:
Which I take to be, How do we know something that we observe is "emergent"
without knowing a huge amount about the culture of the participants, and
the genre of the performance? It might seem to us to be emergent, but in
fact to have actually been pre-determined, a shared part of the cultural or
performance practice that all of the performers know. For example, a scene
about ordering dinner in a restaurant only works because we all know alot
about what happens in restaurants. Schank and Abelson's "script theory" of
social knowledge emphasized these shared scripted elements and thus seemed
to hold that "emergence" didn't really happen. And macro-deterministic
social theories imply the same (Jay's earlier posting pointed out the
problem this posed for Giddens and others who want to retain agency).
But then many conversation analysts showed that even fairly routinized
encounters are actually emergent, collaborative, improvised productions.
Schegloff has a great paper on how the openings of phone conversations,
although apparently scripted, are actually emergently achieved creations
(1986 in HUMAN STUDIES). This tension between script and improvisation is
one the main themes of my 2001 book, "Creating conversations: Improvisation
in everyday discourse".
R. Keith Sawyer
http://www.keithsawyer.com/
Assistant Professor
Department of Education
Washington University
Campus Box 1183
St. Louis, MO 63130
314-935-8724
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