Biological Emergence and Inter-level Causation

Abstract

Our argument in this chapter will be twofold. On the one hand, we will argue that closure can be consistently understood as an emergent regime of causation even though the autonomous perspective is interpreted, as we do, as being fundamentally committed to a monism (of properties). On the other hand, we will maintain that, although the mutual relations between constraints are such that the very existence of each of them depends on their being involved in the whole organisation, an emergent closed organisation does not necessarily imply inter-level causation, be it upward or downward, in the restrictive sense of a causal relation between the whole and its own parts (what we will label nested causation). Yet, the appeal to inter-level causation in this sense (which is the philosophically more interesting and more widely discussed one) may possibly be relevant for organisational closure, if the adequate conceptual justification were provided.