Abstract
Despite an attempt to break with the hierarchical picture in traditional emergentist thought, non-standard accounts of emergence are often still committed to a premise that ontology is prior to epistemology. This paper aims to topple this last remnant of the traditional hierarchy by explicating a pragmatic view of emergence based on John Dewey’s work. Dewey argued that the traditional notion of ontology is premised on a view of existence as complete. Through a discussion of Dewey’s work it is argued that this premise results in a process of reification that unduly excludes from ontology many precarious and indeterminate aspects involved both in everyday life and in philosophic and scientific inquiry. Building on a recent explication of transformational emergence the paper proposes a diachronic and non-hierarchical account of emergence, called pragmatic emergence. According to that account the relation between ontology and epistemology is a temporally reciprocal one. This means that ontological and epistemological features co-determine each other over time. Determinacy and continuity become historical features of a multitude of unfinished processes that we view from within.
Highlights
Emergentism aims to do justice to the observation that at higher degrees of organizational complexity, systems exhibit new phenomena (Kim 1999)
To alleviate this tension in standard emergentism, I wish to offer a defense of an open-ended ontology
If Dewey’s analysis is right, what would that mean for the notion of ontology at work in modern emergentism? Consider the thesis of “ontological determinism” that lies at the heart of the field today (Sartenaer 2015, p. 42)
Summary
Synthese (2021) 198:9021–9034 the emergence of life from simpler physical and chemical interactions. A central issue in thinking about emergence has been the question of how to conceptualize the determinative relations going “upward” or “downward” from the basic constituent to the emergent phenomenon or vice versa As this terminology indicates, standard emergentism is, often explicitly, committed to a hierarchical order of nature (Humphreys 1997; Emmeche et al 1997; Kim 2002). By conceptualizing ontology in that way, the ontological realm is typically assumed to be prior to epistemology and complete in and of itself To alleviate this tension in standard emergentism, I wish to offer a defense of an open-ended ontology. 4, I’ll argue for a temporal reciprocity between an ontological realm and epistemological phenomena, both unfinished but co-determining together in a relational process
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