About the Book
Science, philosophy of science, and metaphysics have long been concerned with the question of how order, stability, and novelty are possible and how they happen. How can order come out of disorder? This book introduces a new account, contextual emergence, seeking to answer these questions. The authors offer an alternative picture of the world with an alternative account of how novelty and order arise, and how both are possible.
Contextual emergence is grounded primarily in the sciences as opposed to logic or metaphysics. It is both an explanatory and ontological account of emergence that gets beyond the impasse between “weak” and “strong” emergence in the emergence debates. It challenges the “foundationalist” or hierarchical picture of reality and emphasizes the ontological and explanatory fundamentality of multiscale stability conditions and their contextual constraints, often operating globally over interconnected, interdependent, and interacting entities and their multiscale relations. It also focuses on the conditions that make the existence, stability, and persistence of emergent systems and their states and observables possible. These conditions and constraints are irreducibly multiscale relations, so it is not surprising that scientific explanation is often multiscale. Such multiscale conditions act as gatekeepers for systems to access modal possibilities (e.g., reducing or enhancing a system's degrees of freedom).
Using examples from across the sciences, ranging from physics to biology to neuroscience and beyond, this book demonstrates that there is an empirically well-grounded, viable alternative to ontological reductionism coupled with explanatory anti-reductionism (weak emergence) and ontological disunity coupled with the impossibility of robust scientific explanation (strong emergence). Central metaphysics of science concerns are also addressed.
Emergence in Context: A Treatise in Twenty-First Century Natural Philosophy is written primarily for philosophers of science, but also professional scientists from multiple disciplines who are interested in emergence and particularly in the metaphysics of science.
Table of Contents:
Preface
1: Introduction
2: Contextual Emergence
3: Intertheoretic Relations and Multiscale Modeling
4: Classical and Quantum Physics
5: Contextual Emergence in Condensed Matter Physics
6: Contextual Emergence in Biology and Neuroscience
7: Ontological and Scientific Implications of Contextual Emergence
About the Author :
Robert C. Bishop is the John and Madeleine McIntyre Endowed Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Wheaton College. His primary research interests are in the history and philosophy of physics, biology, and the social sciences as well as free will. He explores reduction, emergence, and determinism in these areas. He is the author of The Philosophy of the Social Sciences (2007) and The Physics of Emergence (2019).
Michael Silberstein is Professor of Philosophy at Elizabethtown College and the Director of the Cognitive Science Program, Core Neuroscience Faculty member, and Affiliated Faculty in the Philosophy Department at the University of Maryland,
College Park. His primary research interests are foundations of physics and foundations of cognitive science, respectively. He is also interested in how these branches of philosophy and science bear on more general questions of reduction, emergence, and explanation. His most recent book is Beyond the Dynamical Universe: Unifying Block Universe Physics and Time as Experienced (OUP, 2018). Mark Pexton is an independent philosopher of science specialising in
interdisciplinary work. His research areas include: the philosophy of condensed matter physics, causal and non-causal explanations, philosophy of astrophysics, and the science and metaphysics of emergence.
Review :
Distinctive and of high quality, making an important contribution to ongoing discussions of emergence.
A formidable contribution to contemporary emergence theory. The science-first approach is unquestionably original among the most recent books on emergence, and of extreme relevance to fuel a real debate between scientists and philosophers about emergence versus reductionism.
Contextual emergence, the leading concept of this book, provides a truly innovative and profound way of thinking that rejects both the strong reduction movement of the mid-20th century and its opposite of a radical emergence in which anything goes. The authors present numerous insightful applications of contextual emergence across the sciences and show how fruitful it has been for novel and challenging ideas in the philosophy of mind and of science. A book for everyone interested in a middle way between all kinds of rigid fundamentalism on the one hand and relativist patchwork scenarios on the other.
Bishop, Silberstein and Pexton have written a book of compelling value to both philosophers and scientists. The authors help readers understand and conceptualise the difficult phenomenon of emergence, and they put it into context with a rich array of examples from different scientific fields, ranging from quantum physics to ecology. The book is a must-read for anybody interested in the topic.
At present there is little agreement on what exactly emergence is, whether it in fact occurs, and, if it does, what its scientific and metaphysical implications might be. Bishop, Silberstein, and Pexton offer an impressive, historically informed and scientifically detailed account of a phenomenon deserving to be called emergence, an account that advances the discussion by moving beyond the familiar categories of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ emergence:
emergence occurs when multiscale ‘contextual’ factors play a role in the behaviour of a population of particles, cells, organisms, societies, and the universe as a whole. Thus construed, emergence is both ubiquitous and definitive of natural processes at every level of organisation.
Discussions of reduction and emergence have long used scientific examples for illustration but more rarely analyzed scientific practice productively. Bishop, Silberstein, and Pexton give us an exemplar of this productivity in a systematic account of what contexts are-not merely background or boundary conditions-and how they yield a distinctive conception of emergence via forms of stabilization. This makes explicit common patterns of successful reasoning across the sciences and yields a deeply relational ontology that challenges tenets in contemporary metaphysics of science. Its strength lies in the cumulative case built from a close examination of many natural sciences and scrutiny of the consequences for topics such as determinism, mental causation, modality, and realization. This book has the potential to reshape future inquiry, moving us away from false dichotomies of “reduction versus emergence” and toward a practice-grounded scientific metaphysics.
This impressive and fascinating book offers a new approach to understanding reduction and emergence... Detailed case studies from physics, biology and neuroscience illustrate that multi-scale constraints are crucial. It gives a new turn to philosophy of science.
Bishop, Silberstein and Pexton offer, in a Contextual Emergence Tour-de-Force, a highly persuasive view of the material world, and the models of it that the sciences build. Refusing and refuting brute dualisms, either of strong ontological vs. weak emergence, or indeed of mind vs. matter, their radical third way is demonstrated to be faithful to a rich variety of examples from the physical and life sciences. It is the combination of detailed and scientifically-mastered examples, together with a powerful formal and philosophical approach, that makes their case so compelling, and so readable. Lifting one's eyes from their pages to the world around, it also seems clearly true.
The world we live in is filled with marvelous patterns of organization that seem too complex to have emerged out of the simpler component parts of the systems that exhibit them. Emergence in Context is a timely account of the existence and persistence of such emergent patterns and our efforts to understand them.
This book develops in depth in a well-informed way the nature of contextual emergence, which characterizes how emergent structures can arise out of the underlying physical laws while also being independent of them. Basic issues arise such as how stability conditions both close off and open up degrees of freedom. The resulting viewpoint tells us profound things about the nature of reality, so this is an exercise in natural philosophy. It also has real-world implications, as is illustrated by a variety of examples. A very useful contribution.
In a manner all at once perspicuous yet jaunty, the authors present well-evidenced arguments for a novel position within the long-standing reduction/emergence controversy. In a debate overfull with sweeping claims about science yet often supported by examples only from physics, here at last is a view amply grounded in case studies from across the scientific spectrum.
In Emergence in Context, Bishop, Silberstein and Pexton offer a richly detailed account of emergence, drawing on an impressive range of careful case studies to develop and defend their account of how emergent properties arise and why they matter. Their account focuses on the role of contextual constraints in generating and maintaining new patterns of behavior, where those constraints can take a wide variety of forms. This is an excellent example of philosophy that is deeply engaged with science, covering problems from areas such as quantum mechanics, condensed matter physics, systems neuroscience and ecology. This combination of breadth of application and detailed exposition is one of the hallmarks of the account and makes this essential reading for anyone interested in problems concerning emergence, reduction and multiscale modelling in science.
I was both enlightened and informed by the way in which the authors gave a philosophical account of a resolution of the conundrum that arises when one tries to fit molecular structure theory into Schrödinger quantum mechanics. The method that they used seems widely applicable, so the book is surely worth reading by any, who like me, are stuck with a theoretical conundrum.
