2014-04 Soc Emergence rel or func.pdf (260.51 kB)
Social emergence: functional or relational
journal contribution
posted on 2015-05-05, 11:53 authored by Dave Elder-VassThis 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.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Balkan Journal of PhilosophyVolume
6Issue
1Pages
5 - 16Citation
ELDER-VASS, D.J., 2014. Social emergence: functional or relational. Balkan Journal of Philosophy, 6 (1), pp.5-16.Publisher
© Bulgarian Academy of SciencesVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2014ISSN
1313-888XeISSN
2367-5438Publisher version
Language
- en