Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

Social objects originate from constitutive rules. But there are two ways of explaining the relationship between them. I call them “Manifest Image” and “Deep Image”. The former depends on Searle’s interpretation of social reality and it is based on collective intentionality; the latter is the one I support and it is based on documentality. Indeed, recordings and documents are sufficient to explain how and why social world exists. There is no need to use such a vague notion, as that of collective intentionality, in order to give a useful account…

Wilson characterizes weak and strong emergence partly based on their differing solutions to the exclusion problem. The weak emergentist should claim that emergent phenomena and their bases can both cause the same effect without overdetermining it, because they literally share causal powers. I compare this strategy with a different but related strategy also available to the weak emergentist, and argue that the virtues of the former cost more than it appears.

The paper first investigates the tension between reductive accounts of mereological structure and emergence as characterized in Jessica Wilson’s seminal work. It then suggests a new mereology for emergence. Finally, the resulting account is applied to a paradigmatic case of an emergent whole.

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…

In Metaphysical Emergence, Jessica Wilson recognises the problem of higher-level causation as “the most pressing challenge to taking the appearances of emergent structure as genuine” (2021: 39). Then, Wilson states that there are “two and only two strategies of response to this problem” (2021: 40) that lead to Strong and Weak emergence. In this paper, I suggest that there might be an alternative strategy—not opposite, but different in kind—to approach this difficulty. As noticed by Wilson, the problem of higher-level causation was formulated and made central by Jaegwon Kim. However,…

In this article, I shall examine Jessica Wilson’s schema for weak emergence in connection with two questions: why are only certain proper subsets of the powers borne by lower-level features associated with higher-level, weakly emergent features? Why is a certain proper subset of the powers borne by a given lower-level feature associated with a certain higher-level, weakly emergent feature, and vice versa? I shall consider and criticize four possible answers to these questions, including Wilson’s own view. Finally, I shall suggest my own solution, which is based on something akin…