Emergence: From a Mystery to a Research Problem
This paper shows that current philosophical accounts of emergence in philosophy of mind are based on outdated and inadequate conceptions of explanation, reduction and causality. We argue that the debates in philosophy of mind suffer also from some other methodological defects. We propose that William Wimsatts theory of emergence as non-aggregativity provides a fruitful replacement for earlier notions of emergence. This account can be used to articulate different kinds of organizational dependence and it connects the concept of emergence to properties of reductionistic research heuristics used in scientific research.