Chemistry Reference
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why emergence is sometimes seen as an incoherent position. But perhaps it need not
be; perhaps there is a sense in which dependence and autonomy can coexist.
A challenge that emergentists face, therefore, is to explain precisely how this can
be. One way to do this is to conceive of dependence in terms of supervenience, and
of autonomy in terms of the failure of reduction.
3
Thus, emergence can be seen as a
version of nonreductive physicalism:
physicalism
because virtually all approaches
to emergence recognize that at the basis, all there is is physical - the higher strata
are seen as supervening on the physical;
nonreductive
because, for one reason or
another, the higher levels do not reduce to the lower level.
Some authors go beyond this picture and see emergence as depending on
downward causation (Hendry
2006
). Others do not consider downward causation
as a necessary condition for emergence (Batterman
2002
). In this paper I will
assume a fairly liberal concept of emergence - arguably, a theory which does not
include downward causation can still be a theory of emergence if it talks about
levels of reality which are dependent but autonomous from one another.
Developing theories of emergence can be useful to those who are concerned with
the disciplinary autonomy of the special sciences. Since the emergents at one level
are autonomous in relation to the lower level, it is natural to think that the science
studying them is autonomous from the science studying the lower level. The
autonomy of chemistry from physics continues to be debated. Some authors have
attempted to ground the autonomy of chemistry in a philosophical position called
internal realism (Lombardi and Labarca
2005
). But others have argued that chem-
istry cannot be autonomous from physics if it reduces to it (Manafu
2013b
). Thus,
insofar as some kind of failure of reduction seems to be a central ingredient of
emergence, emergence could perhaps account for the autonomy of chemistry.
Of course, whether chemistry is autonomous from physics depends on how one
conceives of autonomy. Unfortunately, the notion of disciplinary autonomy has not
been analyzed sufficiently in the philosophy of science. Many philosophers of
science rely on an intuitive and implicit notion of autonomy.
4
One can distinguish
between several types of autonomy. First, one can talk about historical autonomy.
Historically, chemistry has been independent from physics. It has been claimed that
chemistry had become a science “of great extent and certainty” long before we had
any mechanistic insight into the internal make-up of the elements (Broad
1925
).
Broad argued that for a long time, progress in chemistry was possible without using
3
A set of properties H supervenes on a set of properties L if and only if (i) any two objects x and y
that have the same L properties will necessarily have the same H properties (though not necessarily
viceversa), and (ii) any two objects z and w that differ in their H properties will also differ in their
L properties (though not necessarily viceversa).
4
Hendry (
2012
) is an exception, but he does not give many details. He writes: “A science is
autonomous if its laws and explanations make no appeal to the laws or categories of other
sciences.” (Hendry
2012
, p. 382).
