Is There Anything New Under the Sun?

Abstract

This chapter aims to give substance to a contemporary understanding of emergence from the perspective of the philosophy of science. Looking at progress in the natural sciences, it draws on the concept of self-organization in order to provide a characterization of emergence. From the 1960s onward, theories of self-organization (including complex systems theory, nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory, synergetics, dissipative structures, fractal geometry, and autopoiesis theory) explicitly addressed emergent behavior. Referring to those theories, this chapter enquires into the ontological core as well as into the methodological and epistemological characteristics of self-organization—and, hence, of emergence. It is asked whether there is unity in the diversity of self-organizing phenomena in nature. It will be shown that instabilities constitute the ontological core of self-organization and are, therefore, central to any semantically meaningful understanding of emergence. Besides this ontological condition for the possibility of emergence (instability), the chapter also reveals that there are three further ontological characteristics of emergence, namely, (1) novelty, (2) processuality/temporality, (3) internality (“self”). In addition, related methodological and epistemological characteristics encompass: (4) limits in reproducibility/repeatability, (5) obstacles to predictability and (6) deficits in testability and reductive describability/explainability. In sum, since instabilities play a crucial role in nature, they are essential to any present-day concept of emergence.