Bhaskar and Bunge on Social Emergence

Abstract

This article discusses the theories of social emergence developed by Roy Bhaskar and Mario Bunge. Bhaskar's concept of emergent causal power is shown to be ambiguous, and some of the difficulties of his depth‐relational concept of social emergence are examined. It is argued that Bunge's systemic concept of emergent property is not only different, but also clearer and more consistent than Bhaskar's concept of emergent causal power. Despite its clarity and consistency, Bunge's definition of the concept of emergent property is shown to be too broad and analytically imprecise for the purposes of an emergentist social ontology. It is argued that Bunge's systemic account of social emergence can be developed further by using William Wimsatt's gradual approach to emergent phenomena and his four conditions of aggregativity of a systemic property. It is shown that these conditions provide useful conceptual tools for clarifying and investigating different kinds of mechanisms of social emergence and developing stronger varieties of the concept of emergent social property than that indicated in Bunge's definition of this concept.

Emergence and Reduction

“…Is there an alternative way of utilising emergence theory in social theory that does not encounter the problems associated with its classical form? Some recent adjustments to emergence, notably those by Elder‐Vass (, , ) and Kaidesoja, () initially seem promising. Both authors approvingly cite Wimsatt's (, , ) work and make reference to his revised notion of the concept and suggest (implicitly or explicitly) that adopting this in the social sciences may go a long way towards buttressing an ontology of social emergence.…”

Ontogenesis Versus Morphogenesis Towards an Anti-realist Model of the Constitution of Society

“…Downward causation is frequently assumed to exist (see Lawson,2013), albeit in a controversial way, as I shall show when examining Dave Elder-Vass' work on morphogenesis. Kaidesoja (2009) shows that, in his various works, Bhaskar offers three different and incompatible accounts of social emergence that are quite comparable to the three naturalist imageries presented above. Not surprisingly, Archer tries to coherently combine the first three of these stories of naturalism while often -and controversially -adopting the assumption of downward causation.…”

Foucault, Genealogy, Emergence: Re-Examining The Extra-Discursive

“…This has also been a theme with other critical realist writers (e.g. Pearce, 2007; Kaidesoja, 2009). As this paper will argue, a critical realist understanding of emergence offers Foucault a means of developing his own account of emergence, allowing him to incorporate both “sudden” and “process” emergence.…”

“…The concept of emergence used in critical realism is different from Foucault's. While Bhaskar himself did not use emergence in an entirely consistent way (Kaidesoja, 2009), 10 a more rigorous version of emergence is outlined and developed by Elder‐Vass (2005), one that he terms “compositional emergence”. Using Cunningham's (2001) different conceptions of emergence found in philosophical and scientific work, it is clear that all conceptions of emergence share a common position: that to be “emergent” an entity must have at least two elements that exist in some form of relation to one another in order to produce the emergent entity.…”

“…10 10 Kaidesoja (2009) provides a very interesting discussion of the ambiguity with which Bhaskar develops “emergence”. …”