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This article provides an overview of contemporary religious naturalism, with a specific focus on Christian articulations of this emerging worldview and movement. Section 1 outlines the contours of religious naturalism, some commonly proposed reasons in favour of it, major historical predecessors, as well as neighbouring perspectives. Section 2 moves the focus to Christian naturalism, and how this perspective understands the nature of God, soteriology, and Christology from the vantage points of both reductive and non-reductive forms of naturalism. It also briefly explores the ways in which distinctive communities have emerged that advocate for religious naturalism, and some possible practices that seem congruent with the principles of this worldview. Section 3 unpacks several challenges facing a religiously naturalistic outlook, focusing on its religious relevance, issues of demarcation, the problem of evil, and the philosophical plausibility of a naturalistic ontology itself.

The goal of science is to explain reality and the world, and the goal of philosophy is also ontology. Philosophical views on scientific opinions and scientific opinions have had a direct influence on the way of worldview and ontology. Since the early twentieth century, the scientific flow of reduction affects logic and philosophy, psychology and sociology, and even theology and religion. On the other hand, the new emergent flow of emergentism in opposition to reductionism flourished in the late twentieth century. The philosophical and analytical validation of these two seemingly contradictory views promotes the levels of scientific methods and approaches, as well as philosophical views, especially philosophies such as the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of psychology, and the philosophy of sociology. Reductionism is trying to coordinate with unity, realize the unity of sciences, eliminate the waste of scientific theories, and provide the possibility of a stronger justification. On the other hand, emergentism involves the hierarchical plurality of the world's creatures. On the other hand, emergentism involves the hierarchical plurality of the world's creatures which causes the classification of science. Each level and class have its lows, rules, and concepts per se. Reductionism is unable to explain the plurality of facts and levels of existence; But emergentism with its theoretical framework explains both the continuum, unity and multiplicity of reality means the hierarchical plurality of reality. the reduction merely is an essential step in understanding and discovering down-up causality that is used as one of the theoretical concepts of emergentism and somewhat explains the cause of the relationship between the layers of existence. But reduction strategy is not successful in recognizing and explaining the existence of layers and classes of science. Reductions with a priority look at reality are subject to selfish judgment and preference, but in emergentism, reality and ontology determine and identify the methodology and epistemology.

In the context of socio-technical systems, traditional engineering approaches are inadequate, calling for a fundamental change in perspective. A different approach encourages viewing socio-technical systems as complex living entities rather than through a simplistic lens, which enhances our understanding of their dynamics. However, these systems are designed to facilitate human activities, and the goal is not only to comprehend how they operate but also to guide their function. Currently, we lack the appropriate terminology. Hence, we introduce two principal concepts, simplexity and complixity, drawing inspiration from how nature conceals intricate mechanisms beneath straightforward, user-friendly interfaces.

Historically and today, the movement of naturalism affirms the reality of the natural world, rejecting religious views of God, the soul, and values when these are understood to be supernatural or transcending the natural world. There are two forms of naturalism. According to scientific naturalism, what exists is ultimately describable and explainable by the natural sciences (physics, biology, chemistry). More liberal, expansive forms of naturalism allow for the social sciences, nonreductive views of the self, and values. Scientific naturalism faces substantial philosophical objections. More expansive forms of naturalism have been more philosophically resilient and been more hospitable to theological developments, even (according to some) allowing for a non-supernatural form of theism. Theological responses to both forms of naturalism have ranged from a defence of non-naturalist religious ideas to the appropriation of some forms of naturalism, including what is referred to as religious naturalism.

Humans are complex systems, ‘macro-entities’, whose existence, behaviour and consciousness stem out of the configurations of physical entities on the micro-level of the physical world. But an explanation of what humans do and think cannot be found through ‘tracking us back’, so to speak, to micro-particles. So, in explaining human behaviour, including linguistic behaviour on which this paper focuses, emergentism opens up a powerful opportunity to explain what it is exactly that emerged on that level, bearing in mind the end product in the form of the intra- and inter-cultural diversity. Currently there is a gap in emergentism research. On one hand, there are discussions in philosophy of the emergent human reality; on the other, there are discussions of social, cultural, or individual variation of these emergent aspects of humanity in the fields of anthropology, sociology, linguistics or psychology. What I do in this paper is look for a way to ‘trace’ some such diversified emergents from what is universal about their ‘coming to being’, all the way through to their diversification. My chosen emergent is human time, my domain of inquiry is natural-language discourse, and the drive behind this project is to understand the link between ‘real’ time of spacetime on the micro-level from which we emerged and the human time devised by us, paying close attention to the overwhelming diversity in which temporal reference is expressed in human languages. The main question is, where does this diversity fit in? Does understanding of this diversity, as well as of what lurks under the surface of this diversity, aid the emergentism story? My contribution to this volume on ‘the nature of structure and the structure of nature’ thus takes the following take on the title. The structure of human communication is at the same time uniform, universal, and relative to culture, in that it is emergent as a human characteristic, and as such compatible with the micro-level correlates in some essential ways, but also free to fly in different directions that are specific to societies and cultures. I explore here the grey area between the micro-level and the linguistic reflections of time—the middle ground that is emergent itself but that tends to be by-passed by those who approach the question of human flowing time from either end: metaphysics and the philosophy of time on the one hand, and contrastive linguistics, anthropological linguistics and language documentation on the other. I illustrate the debate with examples from tensed and tenseless languages from different language families, entertaining the possibility of a conceptual universal pertaining to time as degrees of epistemic modality. Needless to say, putting the question in this way also sets out my (not unassailable) methodology.

Introduction A good example of emergentism - interpreted by M. Siderits [1] as - Buddhist reductionism) is an excerpt from the dialogue between King Milinda[4] and the monk Nāgasena[5] about the self, which is part of the text close to the Abhidhamma tradition entitled "Milindapaha" (or "Questions of King Milinda"). The text was published by V. Trenckner in 1880 in [2] and translated into English by T.W. Rhys Davids [3] in the series "Sacred Books of the East". Furthermore, there is an English translation by I. B. Horner [4] and Bhikkhu Pesala [5] and into Russian by A.V. Paribok [6]. There are also German [7] and French translations [8; 9]. Yet the classical translation by Rhys Davids is currently largely obsolete. Paribok's translation into Russian is not convenient for practical use as it would need to be further translated into English, and this double translation, which is not very good from the point of view of the philological approach to the text. We have therefore decided to make our own, new translation of the passage from "Milindapaha", in which the dialogue about the self is being held.

In this paper I map the conceptual framework of naturalism, its ontological implications and its current projection in the field of neurophilosophy. I show how critical naturalism formally differs from radical ontological naturalisms, both global and sectoral, in order to become a critical instance. Its theoretical implications lead to a definition of natural causality from the emergentist perspective and to metaphysical scenarios ranging from ontological pluralism to noumenal monism.

An attempt is made to determine when humans have had a soul. For this purpose, mind and soul are distinguished from each other. This clarification of terms makes it possible to criticise the emergentist view, which assumes that the soul arises naturally from the biological organism. The existence of a soul is inferred from the mental activities of humans, which are directed towards the transcendent. Special significance is given to burials. Burials have been practised for at least 448 000 years. Not only Homo sapiens, but also Homo naledi, Homo heidelbergensis steinheimensis and Homo neanderthalensis buried their dead. Therefore, there is good reason to assume that Homo heidelbergensis and all its descendants possessed (and still possess) a soul. Moreover, one can suppose that Homo erectus and Homo naledi also possessed a soul. Contribution: The clear distinction between the immanent mind and the transcendent soul makes us aware that we humans are beings equally at home in immanence and transcendence. Humans have possessed a soul for a very long time, and not only Homo sapiens but also his ancestors and related species.

Emergentism is an important and yet underexplored component of John Dewey’s metaphysical program, and concerns the ways in which existences relate, operate, and grow in coordination with a more inclusive environment. Through an emergent account, Dewey addresses continuities among the generic traits of nature, inanimate substance, biological life, and experiential “fields” such as mind and consciousness. The notion of a field is especially important for depicting the ways in which existences serially interact in accordance with some particular purpose or set of functions. Apart from an emergent scheme that contextualizes the interactive contexts of experience, phenomena such as “mind” and “consciousness” remain enigmatic occurrences. Moreover, cognition, and with it instances of “knowing,” remain susceptible to merely “subjective” characterizations that reinforce a misleading dualism between mind and nature. In addition to its role in addressing naturalistic continuities, Dewey’s emergentism suggests a non-reductive philosophical methodology that directly challenges contemporary varieties of realism and materialism.

The main question in the subject of the divine action in nature is how God, as an immaterial being, relates to nature as a material being. In recent years, some have sought to address this issue by relying on the metaphysics and theology of Thomas Aquinas, and some by appealing to quantum indeterminism as the two mainstream views. A third group has addressed this issue based on emergentism theory. Emergentists have tried to solve the problem of divine action through a new theory of causality. They search for this theory of causality in the relationship between the natural objects that modern science deals with. The other characteristic of emergentism is the monistic approach, therein, while rejecting the substance dualism, does not fall into physicalism. In addition to explaining the emergentism approach, we argue in this paper that emergentism has more explanatory power than the two competing perspectives to solve the problem of divine action. The main argument in explaining its advantage over quantum's view is that emergentists do not provide a temporary answer due to its reliance on the metaphysics of science. In the face of the Thomistic view, the most crucial advantage of emergentism is a more precise interpretation of the laws of nature, which is rooted in the metaphysics of science. However, emergentism itself has been criticized, especially for the taking of panentheism theology.

In this paper, we present a computational approach to bilingual speakers’ non-native (L2) lexical-semantic representations. Specifically, based on detailed analyses of the error patterns shown in our previous simulation results (Zhao and Li Int. J. Bilingual. Educ. Bilingual., 2010, 13, 505–524; Zhao and Li, Bilingualism, 2013, 16, 288–303), we aim at revealing the underlying learning factors that may affect the extent of fuzzy category boundaries within bilinguals’ L2 representation. Here, we first review computational bilingual models in the literature that have focused on simulating L2 lexical representations, including the Developmental Lexicon II (DevLex-II) model (Zhao and Li, Int. J. Bilingual. Educ. Bilingual., 2010, 13, 505–524; Zhao and Li, Bilingualism, 2013, 16, 288–303), on which the current study is based. The DevLex-II modeling results indicate a strong age of acquisition (AoA) effect: When the learning of L2 is early relative to that of native language (L1), functionally distinct lexical representations may be established for both languages; when the learning of L2 is significantly delayed relative to that of L1, fuzzy L2 representations may occur due to the structural consolidation (or the entrenchment) of the L1 lexicon. Next, we explore the error patterns shown in both lexical comprehension and production in DevLex-II. A novel contribution of the current study is that we systematically compare the computational simulation results with empirical findings. Such model-based error analyses extend our previous findings by indicating, especially in the late L2 learning condition, that fuzzy L2 semantic representations emerge and lead to processing errors, including errors in unstable phonology-semantic and semantic-phonemic mappings. The DevLex-II model provides a computational account of the development of bilinguals’ L2 representation with reference to the dynamic interaction and competition between the two lexicons. We point to future directions in which fuzzy L2 representations may be overcome, through a framework that highlights the social learning of L2 (SL2) and the embodied semantic representation of the lexicon in the new language (Li and Jeong, Npj Sci. Learn., 2020, 5, 1–9; Zhang, Yang, Wang and Li, Lang. Cogn. Neurosci., 2020, 35, 1223–1238).

Emergentist approaches to language acquisition identify a core role for language-specific experience and give primacy to other factors like function and domain-general learning mechanisms in syntactic development. This directly contrasts with a nativist structurally oriented approach, which predicts that grammatical development is guided by Universal Grammar and that structural factors constrain acquisition. Cantonese relative clauses (RCs) offer a good opportunity to test these perspectives because its typologically rare properties decouple the roles of frequency and complexity in subject- and object-RCs in a way not possible in European languages. Specifically, Cantonese object RCs of the classifier type are frequently attested in children’s linguistic experience and are isomorphic to frequent and early-acquired simple SVO transitive clauses, but according to formal grammatical analyses Cantonese subject RCs are computationally less demanding to process. Thus, the two opposing theories make different predictions: the emergentist approach predicts a specific preference for object RCs of the classifier type, whereas the structurally oriented approach predicts a subject advantage. In the current study we revisited this issue. Eighty-seven monolingual Cantonese children aged between 3;2 and 3;11 (Mage: 3;6) participated in an elicited production task designed to elicit production of subject- and object- RCs. The children were very young and most of them produced only noun phrases when RCs were elicited. Those (nine children) who did produce RCs produced overwhelmingly more object RCs than subject RCs, even when animacy cues were controlled. The majority of object RCs produced were the frequent classifier-type RCs. The findings concur with our hypothesis from the emergentist perspectives that input frequency and formal and functional similarity to known structures guide acquisition.

This paper, aligned with contemporary thinking in terms of patient-centered care and co-creation of patient care, highlights the limitations of the reductionist approaches to psychiatry, offering an alternative, “emergent” perspective and approach. Assuming that psychopathological phenomena are essentially relational, what kind of epistemological framework and ‘logic of discovery’ should be adopted? I review two standard methods I call ‘ticking boxes’ and ‘drafting arrows’. Within the ticking boxes framework, the clinician’s main goal is to discover whether a patient showing psychopathological phenomena meets pre-given diagnostic criteria. The process of discovery can be compared to two people assembling a puzzle where the patient has the pieces and the interviewer has the image of the completed design. Drafting arrows consists in constructing pathogenetic diagrams that display linear causative relationships between variables connected by an arrow to other nodes. These explanatory narratives include psychodynamic (motivational) and biological (causal) diagrams. I argue for a third approach called ‘linking dots’, a method of discovery based on the emergent properties of psychopathological phenomena. I build on and develop the approach to images and discovery devised by art historian Aby Warburg in his atlas of images Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. The visual constellations created by Warburg in the panels of the Bilderatlas can be understood as a method to reveal the layers of memory and the web of relationships manifested in them, inviting the viewer to participate in the production of meanings, forging ever new connections between the images. It is the viewer’s acts of perception that draw relationships between singularities. I suggest that this method is of enormous significance in the context of today’s socio-cultural transformation processes and related forms of psychopathological conditions, which can no longer be comprehended using the categories of existing knowledge systems.

This paper - in order to make a comparative study between Sadra’s theory and a new western theory about soul’s occurrence - first focuses on studying and explaining a new theory in philosophy of mind; called “Emergentism” by contemporary philosophers. The author distinguishes between two version of Emergentism: strong and weak, and describes two challenges against the strong version which have adduced by physicalists. He, then, makes a brief review of Sadra’s theory about soul’s occurrence and its ranks, and thus considers the similarities and differences between Sadra’s view and strong emergentism. This paper, by referring to the common aspects of these two theories, believes that most challenges which have made against strong emergentism are reformable versus Sadra’s theory. He, finally, implicates some explications of Sadraian philosophers about mind – body connection, and shows their inefficiency to meet the objections and ambiguities of physicalist philosophers. He believes that Sadra’s philosophy of mind needs further completion to satisfy this requirement. The main contribution of this paper is explaining the intersections and dissociations of these two theory, and some deficiencies and ambiguities of Sadra’s view before physicalism.

This article, the second of a two-part essay, outlines a solution to certain tensions in Thomist philosophical anthropology concerning the interaction of the human person’s immaterial intellectual or noetic operations with the psychosomatic sensory operations that are constituted from the formal organization of the nervous system. Continuing with where the first part left off, I argue that Thomists should not be tempted by strong emergentist accounts of mental operations that act directly on the brain, but should maintain, with Aquinas, that noetic operations directly interact with psychosomatic operations. I develop a Thomist account of noetic–psychosomatic interactions that expands upon the first part’s rapprochement between the new mechanist philosophy of neuroscience and psychology and hylomorphic animalism. I argue that noetic–psychosomatic interactions are best understood as analogous to the way diverse higher and lower order psychosomatic powers interact by actualizing, coordinating, and directing the operations of other psychosomatic powers. I draw on James Ross’s arguments for the immateriality of intellectual operations as realizing definite pure functions in order to elucidate the way noetic operations uniquely actualize, coordinate, and direct the psychosomatic operations they interact with. I conclude with a conjectural sketch of how this presentation of Thomist philosophical anthropology understands the noetic and psychosomatic deficits brought about by damage to the nervous system.

Abstract Following an emergentist approach, the authors examined the comprehension of four different types of restrictive relative clauses (direct object/oblique vs. subject/indirect object) with animate/inanimate referents by Iranian EFL learners. To this end, an Oxford placement test and two sets of comprehension tests within a week’s interval were administered. Of the two comprehension tests, one was used to examine the comprehension of direct object/oblique RC’s with inanimate NP referents, and the other one investigated the understanding of subject/indirect object RC’s with animate referents. The results of the first comprehension test showed that there was no significant difference in the comprehension of direct/oblique RC’s with inanimate referents. But the result of the second comprehension test showed their better performance in the subject RC’s than indirect object RC’s with animate referents. The findings of the experiments showed that animacy influenced the processing difficulty of relative clauses which can be considered as a significant reasoning for these preferences or equalities. Current significant theories of relative clause processing can account for these results when additional assumptions are introduced showing that the possibility of semantically driven cues can be considered as a serious alternative.

The mind-body problem represents one of the most debated topics in the neurosciences. From a psychological standpoint, abstract/non-material data are an intrinsic part of the mind, intervening to a large extent in reasoning and decision making processes. Imaging studies also show a strong correlation between higher cognitive functions (such as working memory) and specific cerebral brain regions (a fronto-parietal network of interacting left and right brain areas). In contrast, the physical/material brain would be unable to interact with abstract-immaterial data, such that the psychological processing of abstract data (processes such as thinking, reasoning, and judgment) is attributed to the mind, with the mind representing a distinct entity interposed between the brain and abstract-immaterial data. Recent data suggest that the mind-body problem may simply be an artifact of human experience/ understanding, as the brain actually represents actually an intrinsic part of the mind. Even if the physical brain is not able to interact with abstract mental data, the brain still could process abstract data through a dynamic association between the abstract data and cerebral stimuli/ impulses. This form of processing without interaction defines the mind as a complex neurobiological structure, with the unconscious part of the mind processing abstract-immaterial data in a conscious/ mental format. In this overview, important concepts of psycho-physiologic emergentism, including internal mental reality, internal mental existence, internal mental interaction, and structural and informational dichotomies of the brain, are iterated. Such concepts/properties represent a neuro-informational support system capable of generating four distinct minds within the single brain. Future studies should further develop the dynamic and immaterial-material nature of the mind, as a possible premise for a scientific definition and understanding of mental events like affectivity, emotions, soul, etc.

This article, the first of a two-part essay, presents an account of Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism that engages with recent work on neuroscience and philosophy of mind. I show that Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism is compatible with the new mechanist approach to neuroscience and psychology, but that it is incompatible with strong emergentism in the philosophy of mind. I begin with the basic claims of Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism and focus on its understanding of psychological powers embodied in the nervous system. Next, I introduce the new mechanist approach to neuroscience and psychology and illustrate how it can enrich the more abstract ontological framework of Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism. In the third section of this article I establish in detail the many ways Aristotelian hylomorphic animalism is incompatible with strong emergentism in the philosophy of mind. Based on these fundamental differences I show why a criticism leveled against emergentism by the new mechanist philosophy does not hamper my proposed rapprochement between hylomorphism and the new mechanist philosophy. This conclusion, however, leaves untouched the problem I address in the second article, namely, is the new mechanist philosophy compatible with Aristotelian philosophical anthropology’s contention that intellectual operations are immaterial and interact with the psychosomatic operations of the rational animal?

Beginning with a study of the basic components of the physical world, Almada is developing an explanation of the emergence of the conscious mind. In order to recognize and publicize this enterprise, which is not yet finished, this note (i) offers an overview of Almada’s approach; (ii) challenges his optimism with the well-known hard problem of consciousness; and (iii) argues that his research can be pushed ahead by a coherent conceptual account of emergence.

Este artículo presenta y discute el corpus de doctrina elaborada por Arthur Peacocke sobre la idea de Dios, y de lo teológico-cristiano, que debe ser hoy construida desde la imagen científica del mundo, especialmente la imagen científica de la vida, la evolución y el ser humano. Después de presentar los orígenes bioquímicos de su pensamiento, el conjunto de su obra sobre ciencia/religión y sus presupuestos epistemológicos, esbozamos la forma en que Peacocke entiende la naturaleza del mundo descrito hoy por los resultados básicos de la ciencia (What's There y What's going on). Es un universo al que la ciencia, y primero los filósofos, han tratado de dotar de una inteligibilidad última. Dios aparece en el horizonte como un posible factor de inteligibilidad que permite entender los rasgos fundamentales de una posible acción de Dios en el mundo. Todo esto conduce a la clásica visión emergentista, panenteísta de Peacocke y a su discusión con la filosofía del proceso. Por último, presentamos su forma de entender la teología de la kénosis desde la ciencia y discutimos el alcance y significación de su punto de vista.

The article deals with the "Quantum mind"hypothesis which has been elaborated in recent works of Alexander Wendt. It is ultimately significant to analyze this hypothesis and to expand on its difficulties and possible inconsistencies given Wendt's credentials in IR theorizing. It allows us to develop a new approach and promising research program on the basis of the hypothesis and its critical reflection. Wendt's quantum physicalism (or holism) implies serious philosophical injury and outstanding usage of different science disciplines' apparatus including physics, biology, and psychology. Thought-provoking approach of Wendt boosts researching efforts within the field of political philosophy, world politics and international relations. The main feature of the hypothesis is the idea of quantum nature in social and political processes which appears to be the consequence of epistemological authority of current science. Alexander Wendt proposes several explanations for quantum foundations within the political and social processes including wide-known "agent-structure" dilemma. According to him, invisibility of social structures does not lead to denial of its existence. Firstly, social structures emerge from the space of possibilities and are not directly dependant on material factors. Secondly, invisibility and its acceptance in different areas are parts of science clarification in many areas including quantum physics. The article discuses how quantum physics principles such as particle-wave dualism, superposition and size absoluteness can be useful in social and political studies. This allows us to demonstrate the given hypothesi' potential in research field of social sciences with regard to international relations and world politics.

The article deals with the "Quantum mind"hypothesis which has been elaborated in recent works of Alexander Wendt. It is ultimately significant to analyze this hypothesis and to expand on its difficulties and possible inconsistencies given Wendt's credentials in IR theorizing. It allows us to develop a new approach and promising research program on the basis of the hypothesis and its critical reflection. Wendt's quantum physicalism (or holism) implies serious philosophical injury and outstanding usage of different science disciplines' apparatus including physics, biology, and psychology. Thought-provoking approach of Wendt boosts researching efforts within the field of political philosophy, world politics and international relations. The main feature of the hypothesis is the idea of quantum nature in social and political processes which appears to be the consequence of epistemological authority of current science. Alexander Wendt proposes several explanations for quantum foundations within the political and social processes including wide-known "agent-structure" dilemma. According to him, invisibility of social structures does not lead to denial of its existence. Firstly, social structures emerge from the space of possibilities and are not directly dependant on material factors. Secondly, invisibility and its acceptance in different areas are parts of science clarification in many areas including quantum physics. The article discuses how quantum physics principles such as particle-wave dualism, superposition and size absoluteness can be useful in social and political studies. This allows us to demonstrate the given hypothesi' potential in research field of social sciences with regard to international relations and world politics.

The article deals with the "Quantum mind"hypothesis which has been elaborated in recent works of Alexander Wendt. It is ultimately significant to analyze this hypothesis and to expand on its difficulties and possible inconsistencies given Wendt's credentials in IR theorizing. It allows us to develop a new approach and promising research program on the basis of the hypothesis and its critical reflection. Wendt's quantum physicalism (or holism) implies serious philosophical injury and outstanding usage of different science disciplines' apparatus including physics, biology, and psychology. Thought-provoking approach of Wendt boosts researching efforts within the field of political philosophy, world politics and international relations. The main feature of the hypothesis is the idea of quantum nature in social and political processes which appears to be the consequence of epistemological authority of current science. Alexander Wendt proposes several explanations for quantum foundations within the political and social processes including wide-known "agent-structure" dilemma. According to him, invisibility of social structures does not lead to denial of its existence. Firstly, social structures emerge from the space of possibilities and are not directly dependant on material factors. Secondly, invisibility and its acceptance in different areas are parts of science clarification in many areas including quantum physics. The article discuses how quantum physics principles such as particle-wave dualism, superposition and size absoluteness can be useful in social and political studies. This allows us to demonstrate the given hypothesi' potential in research field of social sciences with regard to international relations and world politics.

In this paper, we propose three lines of argumentation against Nannini’s eliminativist approach towards consciousness and the Self. First, we argue that the premises he uses to argue for eliminativism can equally well be used to draw a completely different conclusion in favor of naturalistic dualism according to which phenomenal consciousness irreducibly emerges from a physical substrate by virtue of certain psychophysical laws of nature. Nannini proposes that in contrast to dualistic theses which represent the manifest image of the world, eliminativism represents the world’s scientific image just as classical physics and theories of relativity respectively represent the world’s manifest image and scientific image. And if developments in a scientific field reveal a conflict between these two images we should always vote for the scientific image. In our second line of argument, we challenge this claim by comparing two rival interpretations of quantum mechanics, i.e. the Copenhagen and Bohmian interpretation of quantum mechanics. Finally, we argue that Nannini’s identification of consciousness and the Self as illusions does not shed any light on the hard problem of consciousness since illusions themselves are instances of phenomenal experiences and need to be explained.

Taking into account emergentist perspectives on Second Language Acquisition, this article expands on Besse (1974) « exercices de conceptualisation ». It suggests that conceptualisation or consciousness raising activities should aim at establishing a relationship between implicit and explicit learning. Learners’ intuition (based on statistical learning acquired through language use) should be confronted to grammar description in order to build metalinguistic representations about language structures, and strategies to use these structures and to keep on learning. Exploring adult learners’ elicitation, this article suggests objectives for conceptualisation activities for the learning of grammatical gender in French, more specifically for noun gender assignment.

Despite its recent popularity, Emergence is still a field where philosophers and physicists often talk past each other. In fact, while philosophical discussions focus mostly on ontological emergence, physical theory is inherently limited to the epistemological level and the impossibility of its conclusions to provide direct evidence for ontological claims is often underestimated. Nevertheless, the emergentist philosopher’s case against reductionist theories of how the different levels of reality are related to each other can still gain from the assessment of paradigmatic examples of discontinuity between models in physics, even though their implications must be handled with care.

In her paper, Joëlle Aden considers the implementation of an enactive approach which would participate in defining the contours of a first-person experienced method of exploration. We will try to question this framework by analyzing how the body is theorized in linguistic emergentism. We will reconsider her epistemological analysis which led her to acknowledge we are INSIDE language. We will follow her proposition for an epistemological shift in the field of education and applied linguistics while considering, with hindsight, the possibility of generalizing such a framework.

The discussion of the paper of Wander Lowie presented in this contribution attempts to situate the Complex Dynamic System Theory claimed by Lowie, within the schools and theories which structure the field of Second Language Acquisition Research. The paper examines briefly some of the controversies within SLA research between cognitive and neuronal theories of language acquisition and theories focused on L2 acquisition as socialization.The paper also examines the way in which emergentist theories may contribute to the theories and practices of Language Didactics.

This paper outlines second language development as an emergent and complex dynamic process. Language acquisition from an emergent perspective is defined as a highly individual process in which subsystems continuously interact in shaping the ever-changing system. The interacting subsystems result in a degree of intra-individual variability that is characteristic for the process of language learning : more variability indicates more learning. The most important implication for research into language acquisition is that we need more longitudinal case studies that allow us to track individual development as it evolves over time. The most important implication for teaching is that we should acknowledge the variability in a learner’s language and that language teaching should ideally take the form of individual coaching. Another implication is that using language as an active means of communication is an indispensable component of language learning. The emergentist perspective provides a wide-ranging theoretical framework that can help us understand the complex nature of second language development.

This article has an unusual format as its author responds to another article in the same issue that relates the exchanges that took place during a Notion in Question (NEQ) seminar devoted to « Emergentism » in January 2016. The theoretical position of the respondent, a researcher in language learning and teaching, justifies his response. The first part of the article will describe this transdisciplinary position in which emergentism has a place in a plurilingual perspective. The second part is as much a response to Marjolijn’s Verspoor (MV)’s contribution as to the debates on that day. The results of MV’s research are rich and worthwhile but their very limitations justify the need for transdisciplinary collaboration in which the various fields of research complement each other.

This article has an introductory character and systematizes the topic. It introduces the idea of emergence which is currently enjoying something of a renaissance and aims to bring order to the terminology associated with this idea. The article concerns the very beginning of the formation of emergentism and its intuitive understanding. It also presents the main concepts of representative authors of emergentism (S. Alexander, CL Morgan, Ch. D. Broad) as well as the numerous characteristics of emergence (synchronic and diachronic emergence, weak and strong emergence). The article concludes with a systematization of meanings and contexts in which the concept of emergence occurs.

In this paper I discuss Terrence Deacon's hypothesis about the origin of human aesthetic faculty, which he interprets as a by-product of human acquisition of language. In discussing Deacon's hypothesis I introduce the question about the adoption of exaptive evolutionary hypotheses in studies on human evolution and especially on human evolution of aesthetic faculty.

Concerning issues in first language acquisition, the present paper explores positions in theory- making, asyntacticity of early child language, Piaget's idea about children's logical thinking, Vygotsky's and Chomsky's controversy over the origins of language, the relationship between communicative competence and other abilities, the stage where child's utterance is counted to be communicative, reflecting on the relationship between language and thought, the idea of modularity, the role of emergentism in language acquisition, and the authors’ perspectives about different explanations on language acquisition in general.

I look at some central positions in the mental causation debate – reductionism, emergentism, and nonreductive physicalism – on the hypothesis that mental causation is intelligible. On this hypothesis, mental causes and their effects are internally related so that they intelligibly “fit”, analogous to the way puzzle pieces interlock, or shades of red fall into order within a color sphere. The assumption of intelligibility has what I take to be a welcome consequence: deciding among rivals in the mental causation debate could end up to be largely an empirical matter.

This work aims to contribute to the discussion of mind-brain interactions from an emergentism point of view of the Philosophy of Mind, using some of the naturalized theories. Some proposed bridges between mind and brain based on experimental naturalization are neuro-psychoanalysis, mirror neurons, and psychosomatics, among others. Naturalization can be achieved by earching for the link between psychological and biological processes. This biological-based approach can be developed avoiding mplification and reductionism of psychological processes. We discuss the access to new insights about the mind-brain relationship and its implications through neurophenomenology, from an emerging and interactionist point of view.

Este estudo investiga a aquisição das fricativas do português brasileiro, focalizando a relação entre a frequência lexical e segmental de dois “corpora”, retirados do banco de dados LIDES (Linguagem Infantil em Desenvolvimento), coletados durante a interação adulto-bebê: um “corpus” da fala adulta direcionada à criança e um “corpus” com dados de produção de fala de seis bebês de um a três anos. O objetivo foi comparar as características de ambos à luz da visão emergentista da aquisição da linguagem, enfatizando o papel da frequência linguística na aquisição desses segmentos. Comparamos as correlações existentes na fala dos bebês e cuidadores, no processo de interação, e interpretamos as informações estatísticas buscando explicar os resultados de produção de fala numa perspectiva dinâmica de aquisição da linguagem.This study investigates the acquisition of fricatives of BrazilianPortuguese, by focusing on the relationship between lexical and segmental frequency in two corpora of data collected during adult-child interaction: a corpus of adult child-directed speech and a corpus of the words produced by six babies aged 1-4 year-old. The aim was to compare, in an emergentist perspective, type and toke frequency of fricative segments in the lexicon of both corpora, and the results regarding speech production are interpreted according to a dynamic view of language acquisition.

The theory of integrative levels provides a general description of the evolution of matter through successive orders of complexity and integration. Along its development, material forms pass through different levels of organization, such as physical, chemical, biological or sociological. The appearance of novel structures and dynamics during this process of development of matter in complex systems has been called emergence. Social neuroscience (SN), an interdisciplinary field that aims to investigate the biological mechanisms that underlie social structures, processes, and behavior and the influences between social and biological levels of organization, has affirmed the necessity for including social context as an essential element to understand the human behavior. To do this, SN proposes a multilevel integrative approach by means of three principles: multiple determinism, nonadditive determinism and reciprocal determinism. These theoretical principles seem to share the basic tenets of the theory of integrative levels but, in this paper, we aim to reveal the differences among both doctrines.First, SN asserts that combination of neural and social variables can produce emergent phenomena that would not be predictable from a neuroscientific or social psychological analysis alone; SN also suggests that to achieve a complete understanding of social structures we should use an integrative analysis that encompasses levels of organization ranging from the genetic level to the social one; finally, SN establishes that there can be mutual influences between biological and social factors in determining behavior, accepting, therefore, a double influence, upward from biology to social level, and downward, from social level to biology.In contrast, following the theory of integrative levels, emergent phenomena are not produced by the combination of variables from two levels, but by the increment of complexity at one level. In addition, the social behavior and structures might be contemplated not as the result of mixing or summing social and biological influences, but as emergent phenomena that should be described with its own laws. Finally, following the integrative levels view, influences upward, from biology to social level, and downward, from social level to biology, might not be equivalent, since the bottom-up processes are emergent and the downward causation is not.

The main message of this paper is that systemism is best suited for transdisciplinary studies. A description of disciplinary sciences, transdisciplinary sciences and systems sciences is given, along with their different definitions of aims, scope and tools. The rationale for transdisciplinarity is global challenges, which are complex. The rationale for systemism is the concretization of understanding complexity. Drawing upon Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s intention of a General System Theory, three items deserve attention—the world-view of a synergistic systems technology, the world picture of an emergentist systems theory, and the way of thinking of an integrationist systems method.

In this paper I discuss Terrence Deacon's hypothesis about the origin of human aesthetic faculty, which he interprets as a by-product of human acquisition of language. In discussing Deacon's hypothesis I introduce the question about the adoption of exaptive evolutionary hypotheses in studies on human evolution and especially on human evolution of aesthetic faculty.