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Emergence and the realist account of cause

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-07-10, 10:18 authored by Dave Elder-Vass
The concept of emergence is routinely invoked in critical realist theory, but rarely examined. Yet emergence is fundamental to the realist account of cause. This paper aims to improve critical realism's understanding of emergence by discussing, first, what emergence is and how it works; second, the need for a compositional account of emergence; and third, the implications of emergence for causation. It goes on to argue that the theory of emergence leads to the recognition of certain hitherto neglected similarities between real causal powers and actual causation.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Journal of Critical Realism

Volume

4

Issue

(2)

Pages

315 - 38

Citation

ELDER-VASS, D., 2005. Emergence and the realist account of cause. Journal of Critical Realism, 4 (2), pp.315-338.

Publisher

Taylor and Francis

Version

  • 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

2005

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Critical Realism on 21/04/2015, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/jocr.v4i2.315.

ISSN

1476-7430

eISSN

1572-5138

Language

  • en