Taking steps from Wilson’s distinction between strong and weak emergence, in this paper I cast doubts on the prospect of weak emergence. After discussing the relationship between properties set at different levels and supporting different counterfactuals and laws, I discuss one crucial condition for a property to be weakly emergent, one that is usually taken as the primary motivation for emergence, that of being “realization indifferent”. I set an argument aimed at showing that this realization indifference does not accord with systematic relations holding between properties set at the mental level vis-a-vis their realizers. Since it is not possible to have mental properties which are not systematic, mental properties cannot be weakly emergent properties.
The issue of emergence still is the issue of whether special sciences are autonomous with respect to non-special, or fundamental, sciences. Such an issue was set by the debate, spanned over the years, between Jerry Fodor (1974, 1997) and Jaegwon Kim (1992, 1998 and 1999). The issue of emergence has both an epistemological side—the knowledge and methodology that we use to understand some properties in the world is absolutely specific to those properties?—and an ontological side—are there independent chunks of reality? How do they connect with other…
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