Abstract

I begin to develop a framework for emergence in the physical sciences. Namely, I propose to explicate ontological emergence in terms of the notion of ‘novel reference’, and of an account of interpretation as a map from theory to world. I then construe ontological emergence as the “failure of the interpretation to mesh” with an appropriate linkage map between theories. Ontological emergence can obtain between theories that have the same extension but different intensions, and between theories that have both different extensions and intensions. I illustrate the framework in three examples: the emergence of spontaneous magnetisation in a ferromagnet, the emergence of masslessness, and the emergence of space, in specific models of physics. The account explains why ontological emergence is independent of reduction: namely, because emergence is primarily concerned with adequate interpretation, while the sense of reduction that is relevant here is concerned with inter-theoretic relations between uninterpreted theories.

Highlights

  • The aim of this paper is to introduce and illustrate a criterion for ontological emergence

  • The same can be said about causation: it may play a role in important examples of emergence such as the mind, but it is hard to see how it plays a role in the kind of examples that I discuss in this paper, which are, I believe, “garden variety” for the theoretical physicist, and involve no causation from the bottom to the top entities

  • I take it that Franklin and Knox are discussing epistemic emergence: it is the emergence of a description that is very useful because it is both powerful and explanatorily more parsimonious (cf. (1)-(2) above), since it focusses on the degree of freedom relevant to answer the question at hand, namely: What is the frequency of oscillation of the normal modes? But this is separate from the question whether phonons are “really out there in the world”

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Summary

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to introduce and illustrate a criterion for ontological emergence. The framework is formal, where by ‘formal’ I just mean ‘admitting of the basic notions of sets and maps’. The framework will be illustrated by three examples: the emergence of spontaneous magnetization in a ferromagnet, the emergence

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Emergence and related notions
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The conception of emergence
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Ontological emergence as novel reference
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Further development
Which systems?
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Ontology and metaphysics
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Comparing to other recent work
Some work on emergence in general
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Some work on specific emergence: the case of phonons
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How broad?
First case study: spontaneous magnetisation in ferromagnetism
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Second case study: masslessness in relativistic mechanics
The bottom theory Tb for the point-particle
Emergence as non-commutativity of linkage and interpretation
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Third case study
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Conclusion
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Full Text
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