Abstract
Scientists use a plurality of conceptual frameworks in order to explain the phenomena that really matters to them. This situation arises because some sciences study very complex systems. A non-reductive approach to complexity usually relies on notions like supervenience and emergence to characterize what its proponents see as novel and salient features of composite systems. It is those inherent properties that cannot be reduced to properties that belong to the constituents of the system. However, taking notions like supervenience and emergence seriously we introduce ontological levels of reality, which bring in certain problems of their own. In this paper I suggest a different non-reductive approach to complexity in which complex properties of a system are not inherent but occasioned by the system’s environment.
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- 1.
It may seem arbitrary to make some form of spatial containment the environmental boundaries of most systems. The gravitational force of a body is not confined to the spatial containment of its mass and one could easily argue that this force, which stretches far beyond the matter itself, belongs to a system together with the body. Nevertheless, although a spatial distinction between body and its environment may be neither sufficient nor necessary for specifying the boundary, our concept of a physical entity is very much associated with what we can and cannot count, such that spatial concentration of matter for many purposes defines a body’s boundary to its environment.
- 2.
This is essentially Craver’s formalism. See Craver (2007).
- 3.
Indeed, this is a week conception of emergence that even reductionists concerning explanation might accept, because it does wave aside a possible explanation of how the individual starlings produce the behaviour of the flock. The conception has been chosen deliberately in order to include both a supervenient description of the flock behaviour and yet allow an explanatory reduction of this behaviour in terms of its subvenient basis. So a non-reductionist who insists on the existence of genuine levels of reality has to argue in addition that such an explanation is not possible because it conceptually presupposes the existence of what has to be explained.
- 4.
Here Kim has a note saying. “Obviously extrinsic/relational/historical properties (e.g., being 50 miles to the south of Boston) must be excluded, and the statement is to be understood to apply only to the intrinsic properties of systems. There is also a tacit assumption that the intrinsic properties of a system determine its causal powers.”
- 5.
In her book Unsimple Truths (2009) Sandra Mitchell criticizes Kim for conflating compositional materialism, i.e., that everything consists of one physical substance, and descriptive fundamentalism, i.e., that there exists a complete and privileged description that can capture everything which can be said about this substance. Mitchell thus argues, “Kim’s attempt to clarify the philosophical conception of emergence has stripped it of any scientifically interesting features, and hence it fails to apply to the properties that scientists have identified as emergent, properties like division of labor in social insect colonies, which have different material realizations for different species of ants, bees, and termites, and perhaps the same dynamics of how the higher-level properties are generated” (p. 32). She also points to the flocking behaviour of starlings as an example of emergence, and she regards such behaviour to be an expression of the non-linear dynamic relationship that exists between the individual bird and the collection of birds. I agree that descriptive fundamentalism is unsupported because any description is always partial. Descriptive fundamentalism presupposes that an exhaustive description can be given in terms of the intrinsic properties belonging to the most fundamental level of reality. But Mitchell continues to talk about “higher-level properties” as if the expression “higher-level properties” has a fundamental metaphysical meaning. In contrast, I suggest that the so-called emergent properties from a vertical perspective are intrinsic properties of “higher-level” systems, but from an alternative horizontal perspective should be understood as relational properties between “lower-level” systems and their environment. Thereby I attempt to show how we can avoid the strong metaphysical commitments that are inevitably associated with the use of expressions like “emergence” and “higher-level properties”.
- 6.
On a response to this, and to Kim’s exclusion problem in particular, see Glennan (2010). His main objection, which I consider as sound, is that it is only objects realizing properties rather than properties themselves that can produce anything. Nevertheless, in my opinion his layered mechanistic solution is not the answer to flock behaviour, since properties of complex systems are not emergent properties of some internal mechanism but the manifestation of such a mechanism caused by something external factor.
- 7.
Extrinsic properties are only one kind of external properties. Other external properties are spatial and temporal relations. Likewise intrinsic properties are not the only internal properties. Dispositions would normally also count as internal properties.
- 8.
Depending on how one considers mechanism we may either say that a system consists of some mechanism or that it contains a mechanism. If we include, as the new mechanistic philosophy does, entities that exhibit a certain activity into the characterization of the mechanism of the system, then the system obviously consists of its mechanism. But if we exclude those entities from the characterization of the mechanism, then it would correct to say that the system contain or exhibit a mechanism.
- 9.
Already Lewis (1966) talked about the causal role of experience is identical to the causal role of the physical state and therefore experiences must be physical states. But where Armstrong and Lewis were willing to identify an experience with its physical basis, because they believe that the ascription of experience and the ascription of neutral states to a system have the same reference, I for my part hold that the disposition of a system refer to the causal capacity of physical states that originally made the categorical basis an apt state. I take a disposition is not identical to a categorical basis as such but to its capacity to process information in responses to some external stimuli. Thus a behavioral disposition is identical to a neuronal disposition and not to the neuronal basis itself.
References
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Acknowledgement
I want to thank Brigitte Falkenburg and Stuart Glennan for insightful comments to an earlier version of this paper.
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Faye, J. (2019). Causal Mechanisms, Complexity, and the Environment. In: Falkenburg, B., Schiemann, G. (eds) Mechanistic Explanations in Physics and Beyond. European Studies in Philosophy of Science, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10707-9_9
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