(In response to Jay's multiple postings; I'll reply to Mike's request for
empirical implications in a separate email. This one addresses
theoretical issues. I'll try to be brief!)
I was excited to see Jay's postings on these issues, because he has been
concerned with issues surrounding complex dynamical systems for many
years. Jay is one of the theorists who really "gets it"
about situated microsocial interaction--he was one of the first to
comment on "retroactive contextualization" (in his 1982
report), along with Gordon Wells (1981, in Paul Werth, editor); thus I
assume that these ideas came out of the Halliday tradition that both
Gordon and Jay draw on. These ideas are absolutely critical to my
own conceptualization of how improvisational interaction works, although
I developed my theories from Michael Silverstein's work on metapragmatics
and indexicality.
Jay has written a lot of interesting stuff about emergence, downward
causation, and complex systems; I'll toot his horn and list some
references:
Lemke, Jay L. 1991. “Text production and dynamic text semantics.” Pp.
23-38 in Functional and systemic linguistics: Approaches and uses,
edited by E. Ventola. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lemke, Jay L. 1995. “Emergent agendas in collaborative activity.” in
American Educational Research Association. San Francisco, CA: ERIC
number ED386425 .
Lemke, Jay L. 2000. “Material sign processes and emergent ecosocial
organization.” Pp. 181-213 in Downward causation: Mind, bodies and
matter, edited by P. B. g. Andersen, C. Emmeche, N. O. Finnemann, and
P. V. Christiansen. Aarhus, Netherlands: Aarhus University Press.
(Jay recommended this volume in his email; he extends the ideas herein in
his 2000 MCA article "Across the scales of time".)
I agree with most of what Jay wrote in his two theoretical postings,
although there are some points at which I think he has misunderstood me
in ways that makes it seem we have more disagreement than we do; I'll try
to clarify some of that.
First of all, Jay associates my two articles primarily with philosophy,
and analytic philosophy in particular. But this misrepresents the
articles. The philosophy that I draw on in "Emergence in
psychology" is primarily from the 1920s, long before our current
style of academic philosophy became current; and the main reason I cite
that work is because of its influence on G. H. Mead and thus on
contemporary socioculturalism. I think that Jay and most XMCAers
would consider Mead to be one of the good guys. And the
"Unresolved tensions" article is largely inspired by current
issues in sociological theory--one of the sources that Jay cites
approvingly--not at all by philosophy.
Like Jay, I have found that the most interesting work on emergence is in
sociology and in complex dynamical systems theory, rather than in
philosophy. So I think it's inaccurate for Jay to refer to my
definition of emergence as a "philosophical" one. He
would probably be interested in two other forthcoming articles that would
make it clear how we agree: "Emergence in sociology"
(forthcoming in AJS, 2002) and "Artificial societies," an
article about emergence in complex dynamical systems models (forthcoming
in SMR, 2003). These articles are squarely in the nonlinear dynamic
systems approach that Jay has cited approvingly in the above
articles.
However, I disagree with Jay about the relevance of some philosophical
notions--Kim's writings on supervenience have been a major influence on
me (although ultimately I disagree with him). In fact, in this
tradition "the event" is the fundamental ontological category,
not "the entity," so analytic philosophy is not incompatible
with a process approach. And although I tend to side with
contemporary philosophers who emphasize mechanism rather than causal laws
(e.g. Mario Bunge), I think that we still need notions of causation and
of laws--but that's a debate far removed from XMCA concerns.
In Jay's "separability" posting, he writes that
"emergence, at least in its complex systems version, is not a purely
bottom-up paradigm"--but that's generally not true. For most
of the complex systems people it is exclusively a bottom-up paradigm, as
I show in my paper on "artificial societies." I disagree
with them because I am a realist about higher-level phenomena and I think
there is downward causation in social systems (as does Jay). My
philosophical forays have been primarily in the philosophy of mind and
the philosophy of social science; Jay seems to have spent more time with
philosophers of biology, where the notion of "downward
causation" was first explored (the term was coined by Donald
Campbell in a discussion of evolution in 1974; and David Hull's
influential writings of the early 1970s were anti-reductionist).
But most of that work says little to nothing about "emergence"
per se (an exception being Bechtel and Richardson, 1993, in
"Discovering complexity").
So although just about everyone agrees emergence is important, there
remains much confusion about exactly what it is and how and why it is
important. I think it's wonderful that XMCA has chosen to take on
this issue for discussion.
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