Though I have been pre-occupied with a lot else lately, I had been
following some of the discussions on emergence and "separability". Since
these points raise theoretical issues with which I have also been concerned
for quite a long time, I was sorry not to have time to join in. I'll try to
make up a bit for that now with a few postings.
If you're all too busy writing your papers for ISCRAT, I'll understand if
you archive or delete! but perhaps some of these points will come up again
in Amsterdam ...
I read Keith's papers on "Emergence (Human Development)" and "Unresolved
tensions" (posted here, I think), and overall I found it interesting to
think about how one might classify the positions of various people
according to what seems to me to be mainly the criterial pre-occupations of
philosophers. Longtime readers of xmca will know that I am somewhat
skeptical of the usefulness of academic philosophy, esp. of the Anglo-saxon
school, for purposes of theorizing (or participating in) social dynamics.
This is not to say that all thoughtful scholarship should not address the
pervasive issues that academic philosophers sometimes try to appropriate as
abstract problems for their own discourse (e.g. how who we are
co-constitutes what we think we know, which modes of logic and
argumentation are useful to our enterprises, what are our assumptions about
what's in the world and what it can do, or what's going on that makes us
assume there's a 'what' and a 'do', etc.) as well as many that they no
longer attend to very much (e.g. what it would mean for life to be better
for people, why we ought to be nice to each other, etc.). But more and more
over my lifetime of thinking about such matters, I find the useful ideas
coming from social and cultural theory itself, and from history or
sociology, or not-traditionally-named scholarship about particular
phenomena, or from people trained in and with long experience of such
scholarship who turn from time to time to more abstract questions. I also
have by and large found the French school and post-colonialist inspired
thinking, or standpoint theorizing such as feminism or gender/sexuality
theory, more relevant and useful philosophically.
I do think about why this is so. Some of it is me, obviously, and what I am
interested in. Some of it is the deep-rootedness of anglo-saxon academic
philosophy in the original sins of modernism, or perhaps of "patriarchy"
(e.g. adversarialism, binarism, universalizing discourse,
hyperabstractivism, masculinism, ...).
I can well understand why Keith would have found the history-of-philosophy
categories a convenient classification scheme to organize the very large
number of complex and subtle and mostly rather distinctive and unique
writings and authors he refers to, esp. in the "emergentism" paper, but
really it seems in a whole series of papers he's done, and perhaps for a
book to come. It is very hard to herd so many cats! They really do not want
to stay in the boxes we have carefully built for them. How can we do
justice to hundreds of books in the space of one book, or dozens of essays
in the space of one article? I don't want to lay this dilemma specifically
on Keith, he's just following a long-established academic practice -- but
it is very much a characteristic of modernist academic scholarship that
people try to "take command" of very large fields of discourse by reducing
them to a simple set of abstract binaries.
The result is that we often end up arguing over either (a) whether the
binaries have been properly applied, the writings properly classified, or
(b) whether the particular binaries are useful or applicable. We forget
sometime that most of us long ago rejected binarism itself, or sharp
logical categories as such, as useful tools for serious thinking about the
matters we ourselves study. As someone who uses semiotic methods and
linguistic analysis, I am especially conscious of these limitations and the
need to mess things up, with phenomenological approaches, hermeneutic
subtleties, poetic liberation, and even semiotic strategies that shift from
meaning-by-type to meaning-by-degree.
I really feel very uncomfortable when I hear "emergence" being defined
philosophically rather than scientifically, and being conflated with a
historicist classificatory category like "emergentism". I've been in
meetings where people like Jae Kim have argued for philosophical notions
like "supervenience" among biologists, chemists, physicists, linguists,
social theorists ... and not gotten very much support, or even interest.
These were not conservative scientists, they were quite radical proponents
of complex systems theory, emergent levels of organization, etc. in their
own disciplines. The philosophical definition Keith gives for "emergence"
just is not what emergence really means in these discourse communities; in
fact it sounds downright Newtonian and positively quaint to people for whom
quantum field theory or nonlinear dynamical analysis is second nature. Such
people do not participate in debates in the philosophical literature by and
large and have little interest in them. But it is their work that is making
the notion of emergent levels of organization and emergent qualitative
phenomena, and their origins in multi-agent, nonlinear, strongly coupled
interaction systems, newly interesting for people in the social sciences.
This new paradigm owes very little to the historical versions of
"emergentism" that it gets lumped together with.
Keith does a good service, though, in making us aware that as such notions
are appropriated and transformed by psychologists and sociocultural
theorists (or whatever we are!) there is likely to be some conflation, and
even misunderstanding, because we will be looking for familiar points of
reference in our own traditions.
Another small example is the notion of "causal powers" , which is very big
among anglo-saxon philosophers when they try to talk about ontology (and to
a lesser extent methodology or their more favored notion of epistemology).
In complex systems science, and in quantum field theory, one really takes
the notion of causality with a large tablespoon of salt (cf. cum grano
salis!). When at all the levels of analysis anything you define as an
entity is part of a network of interactions with a large number of closed
circular loops, it's pointless to say that any one element is causing
anything. It only "causes" to the extent everything else at any given
moment lets it, and "causality" is distributed. You could then try to
attribute "causal power" to a whole network, but it will in turn be
embedded in a larger network of networks where the same things are going
on. Causality is just not a useful concept in post-classical science, even
if it is still heretical to say so, even among scientists. That's why we
have the concept of interaction. This is true both at the quantum level and
at the macroscopic level (though for slightly different reasons, at least
so far as we understand it up till now).
Ontology itself is problematic. And this will be relevant to talking about
"individuals" in another posting. What happens to constitute a "thing" or
an entity is not entirely definite, it's often either an arbitrary choice
of the analyst or at least quite dependent on the sorts of interactions
"the entity" is participating in. Process ontology by and large makes more
sense, not in any binary contrast to an ontology of things, but simply
insofar as interaction is fundamental, so that the properties that matter
for participation in interaction are what we privilege in defining entities
or participants for the purposes of that particular kind of interaction.
Yes, we can call this a dialectic of structures and processes, but the
structures are in a sense just relatively very slowly changing
configurations of processes, which are themselves material and define what
constitutes the participants or medium of/in the processes. The biggest
problem with process ontology is that it is incompatible with the grammar
and most of the semantics of English and many other languages. We even use
nouns to talk about processes, and in doing so we cannot avoid all the
baggage that comes with being a noun, most of which is very thing-like.
But probably most of you are not too interested in the purely abstract
philosophical arguments on these matters. What we are all much more
interested in is how to understand the embeddedness of the social
individual in larger-scale processes and systems of relationships. I will
try to write a bit in response to the discussion of "separability" issues
later.
JAY.
PS. For those who would like entry points for the notion of emergence in
complex systems theory, including for the social sciences and psychology, try:
P.B. Andersen, C. Emmeche, and N.O. Finnemann-Nielsen, Eds. Downward
Causation: Self-organization in Biology, Psychology, and Society. Aarhus
University Press (Denmark). pp. 181-213. 2000.
J. Chandler and G. van de Vijver, Eds. Closure: Emergent Organizations and
their Dynamics (Volume 901: Annals of the NYAS). New York: New York Academy
of Science Press. pp. 100-111. March, 2000.
J Lemke. "Self-Organization and Psychological Theory." Review of L.B. Smith
& E. Thelen, Eds., A Dynamic Systems Approach to Development. Theory &
Psychology, 6(2): 352-356, 1996. [and the two vols. of Thelen & Smith]
Salthe, S.N. 1985. Evolving hierarchical systems. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Salthe, S.N. 1993. Development and evolution. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kauffman, S. 1993. The origins of order. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bickhard, M. & Terveen, L. 1995. Foundational issues in artificial
intelligence and cognitive science. New York & Amsterdam: Elsevier.Bar-Yam,
Y. 1997. Dynamics of complex systems. Cambridge MA: Perseus Publishing.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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