Emergence and Supervenience

Abstract

This paper presents a brief history of British Emergentism from Mill (1843) to Broad (1925). In the 20th century, the scientific revolution of quantum mechanics led to the reductive explanation of chemical bonding ; and the philosophical results of functionalism and a posteriori necessity also require a reformulation of the notion of emergence. The paper examines an attempt by Van Cleve (1990) to define the notion of an emergent property by appeal to supervenience. Finally, the paper proposes a definition of an emergent property such that if certain sorts of properties (e.g., mental properties) emerge from physical properties, then no version of reductive materialism is true. Whether any sort of property indeed emerges from physical properties will be left an open question.

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