2134/17417
Dave Elder-Vass
Dave
Elder-Vass
Social emergence: functional or relational
Loughborough University
2015
Emergence
Multiple realizability
Reductionism
Critical realism
Mechanisms
Language, Communication and Culture not elsewhere classified
Studies in Human Society not elsewhere classified
2015-05-05 11:53:51
Journal contribution
https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/Social_emergence_functional_or_relational/9475085
This paper outlines a relational variety of the theory of emergence and claims that it can be applied more fruit-fully to sociology than the functional variety advocated by Keith Sawyer. Sawyer argues that the wildly disjunctive multiple realizability of social properties justifies a nonreductive approach to causal explanation in the social sciences (but also ontological individualism). In response, this paper argues, first, that the social properties he dis-cusses are not wildly disjunctive, and secondly, that we can explain their causal significance more effectively with a relational emergence theory linked to the critical realist account of causal powers. Although these properties are multiply realizable, they are not emergent because they are multiply realizable, but despite being so.