Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim - On The Idea of Emergence (1965)

Moving from the previous chapter's account of perhaps the strongest ontological statement of emergence, Hempel and Oppenheim make the counterpoint by arguing that the appearance of "emergent" phenomena is, in fact, a result of our ignorance of intermediary laws. In the tradition of logical positivism, they state that, until we have a micro-theory that gives us insight into the "inner mechanism" of a phenomenon, we do not truly have "real scientific understanding" of it. This epistemic limitation gives rise to our surprise when encountering such a phenomenon, creating illusory emergence, which later dissipates as our knowledge of the world develops.

Emergence is, then, relative to a set of theories, which include a set of bridging laws to map between (say) physico-chemical terms and biological terms. A sufficiently advanced theory-set allows us to deductively infer the relevant macro property, and the emergence vanishes.

What we are left with is the weak emergence in vogue today, against the Emergentist tradition of strong, ontological emergence. Both will be refined further over the next few weeks.

One interesting addendum is their criticism of the resultant/emergent dichotomy adopted by many of the British Emergentists. A property is said to be resultant if it can obviously be deduced from the sum of its parts; for example, the mass of a stone is equal to the additive sum of the mass of its constituent molecules. It is said to be emergent if it is not explainable or predictable from the combination of its parts. However, both of the two classes are really subjective judgments. "Obviousness" is in the eye of the beholder, and a compound behaviour which may seem unpredictable under some set of theories can seem obvious - logically deductable, even - under some other set. Additionally, under the mechanics of relativity, the "obvious" additive property of mass is not, in fact, a linear resultant, and so the argument loses its remaining support.

Note, however, that this is dependent on our beholder having sufficiently broad perspective as to encompass all of the relevant theories and bridge laws, and potentially unlimited computational powers (a la Broad's "mathematical archangel") to be able to follow through the labyrinthine web of causation that may lead to our emergent...