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This article examines the possibilities and limitations of Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism on the problem of structure and agency. Bhaskar’s realist perspective on the problem starts from discussions in the philosophy of science and extends to social theory. In this regard, Bhaskar, building upon the layered reality concept in the philosophy of science, attempted to construct a naturalistic social theory, starting with the concept of ontological stratification and continuing with the theory of causal powers, reinforced by discussions of emergentism. Through this conceptual framework, he offered an explanation beyond the reductionist and synthesist approaches around the mentioned debate. On the other hand, the criticisms of Bhaskar’s naturalistic perspective, especially by contemporary representatives of the critical realist tradition through cognitive neuroscience, have shown the limitations of Bhaskar’s naturalistic view. The article discusses these criticisms and then lays out the grounds for both Bhaskar and his critics. Finally, the similarities between the seemingly conflicting approaches, the sources of these similarities, and the questions they fail to answer are addressed. In addition, it has been argued that the theoretical diversity on the structure-agency problem around these questions is merely an expansion within critical realism itself, and that a paradigmatic solution to the problem could not be produced. For a paradigmatic solution, it is argued that new theoretical considerations based on human nature and human singularity/subjective experience are essential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I am persuaded that the anti‐reductionist stance of the Mistake‐Making Theoretical Framework is fundamentally sound and will prove heuristically fruitful. But the very success of this framework generates a challenge. Many biologically informed metaphysicians have drawn striking conclusions from the fact that biology cannot be reduced to physics and chemistry. One such conclusion is John Dupré's “disunity of the sciences” thesis which follows upon the alleged “disorder of things.” These conclusions threaten to undermine assumptions underpinning the Mistake‐Making Theoretical Framework. In this paper I argue that metaphysicians need to find a middle path between an unattainable reductionism one the one hand and the unwelcome disunity thesis on the other. This is no easy task, as a survey of various proposals makes clear. I argue that adverting to the long‐discredited Aristotelian notion of Prime Matter is the most economical way of achieving unity without reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of artificial intelligence is very popular in both science and culture today. Similarly, the concept of emergence has become quite popular during the last decades in the sciences. For example, it is commonplace in the case of machines to speak of an overall blueprint and several different material components; thus, we can regard the blueprint as a kind of comprehensive emergent additive. However, is it true then that the machine, due to this plus component, is not material? Practically nobody wants to acknowledge that. Still, in practice, there are no machines without added blueprints. In my paper, based on Samuel Alexander’s original concept of emergence, I will investigate these problems and contradictions, which stem from the materialist interpretation of the concept, and I will present a coherent emergentist concept of machines, according to which machines are clearly a unique kind between simple material things and living beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding and characterizing the relationship between mental phenomena and the brain is a huge challenge for modern neuroscience. No doubt, the conservative orthodox view of this relationship can be described as physicalist. Physicalism is the idea that, no matter how enigmatic mental phenomena may seem, they are nevertheless completely describable in physical and material terms. Still, despite centuries of effort, aspects of mind, such as the qualitative nature of subjective experience, have defied physical characterization. In the early 1920s, emergentism was advanced to explain the relationship between physical reality and higher-order phenomena, including life and mind. According to emergentism, such higher-order phenomena are derivative of and, at the same time, autonomous to underlying physical reality. This article describes the historical and philosophical development of emergentist theses, particularly as they have been treated in the neurosciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this article is to unite the different strands of postpositivist thinking about translator education, including both axiological and epistemological, as well as the often-neglected political dimensions. Accordingly, the study considers evidence-based versus values-based education, performativity, dialogue, deconstruction, reflexivity, emergentism, border pedagogy, complexity, pluralism, and the enactment of "multiple voices" (González-Davies 2004). Thirteen postmodern notions and their implications for translation pedagogics are surveyed, including ethics, intersubjectivity, shifting classroom power structures, and the dilemma of canon. How are uncertainty and fragmentariness reconciled with the inherent progress-orientedness of the educational project? And significantly, how is postmodern consciousness enacted in classroom practice? In seeking what Torres del Rey (2002, 271) calls a more participatory and reflexive educational context, I entertain postmodern teaching and learning in the discipline as a possible approach to active, flexible, creative, collaborative, and inclusive roles and identities for both facilitators and learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

Despite the common use of the concept of emergence, no uncontroversial theoretical framework has been yet formulated in this regard. In this paper, I examine what this circumstance suggests about the significance and usefulness of this concept. I first trace a brief history of the notion of emergence from its first formulation among the British Emergentists to its contemporary uses. Then, I outline its most common features and examine three examples of emergent phenomena, namely particle decay, free will, and division of labour in ant colonies. These three cases of emergence exhibit different features and imply criteria which only partially overlap. I then suggest that the multiplicity of features and criteria recognised as defining emergence, rather than being a threat to the tenability of the concept, should encourage the assumption of a pluralist attitude that is consistent with both the employment of this idea in different sciences and the recognition of emergent phenomena across different levels of organisation. Finally, I propose that emergence can be approached in a similar way to how Richard Boyd approached the problem of natural kinds, namely by identifying an open cluster of properties, rather than a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generative AIs such as Google Bard are known to be equipped with techniques and grammatical principles of human language based on a large corpus of text and code that allow them to generate natural-sounding language, and also identify and correct grammatical errors in human-written texts. Still, they are not perfect language generators, and this paper reports some interesting errors produced by Google Bard regarding interpretation of English plain and reflexive pronouns. Although Google Bard is clearly well aware of how to locate the antecedents for English pronouns, it consistently produces seemingly random interpretation errors when the prompt asks it to create a short story based on test sentences containing a plain or a reflexive pronoun. Since it is quite evident that Google Bard does not have an inborn system of grammatical principles including the binding principles, which are used to account for how human beings deal with pronoun interpretation, other approaches to processing human language need to be considered to explain Google Bard's errors and the underlying mechanisms leading up to the errors. Thus, a processing account based on the Emergentist approach (O'Grady, 2005) and the Emergentist Reflexivity Approach model (Sperlich, 2020) is adopted, and the two separate levels of processing, that is, sentence processing and pragmatic processing, are introduced to account for Google Bard's errors and the human language interpretation mechanism that might be underlying. These findings can not only shed light on how generative AIs might be analyzing human language but also contribute to our better understanding of human language and related theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

This study presents an early phase of Jewish Averroism by means of an example of one of its representatives from the 14th century, Yeda'ya Bedersi ha-Penini. On the basis of his commentary on Aristotle's Physics, which is available only as an unedited Hebrew manuscript, Yeda'ya is shown to be a proponent of weak emergentism in the modern sense of the word. This is demonstrated by a detailed analysis of Yeda'ya's views about substantial changes in nature. Furthermore, the article points out some Neoplatonic metaphysical hints in his conception of Aristotelian natural philosophy. Moreover, Yeda'ya considers the mixture of elementary qualities, mezeg, to be a substrate bearing both accidental and substantial change. This substrate can be defined as a necessary corporeal condition for receiving an incorporeal form that would otherwise not have lasted a single moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine Sophie Gibb’s emergent property-dualist theory of mental causation as double-prevention. Her account builds on a commitment to a version of causal realism based on a powers metaphysic. We consider three objections to her account. We show, by drawing out the implications of the ontological commitments of Gibb’s theory of mental causation, that the first two objections fail. But, we argue, owing to worries about cases where there is no double-preventive role to be played by mental properties, her account, which solely affords mental properties a double-preventive role, is incomplete and vulnerable to a causal exclusion objection. We propose a friendly modification to her theory of mental causation that is consistent with her theory’s ontological commitments. Specifically, we sketch an account on which mental properties have a more pronounced causal-structuring role that is not exhausted by the role Gibb assigns them as double-preventers. The result is a novel emergentist theory of mental causation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the existence of God (immaterial substance), how He creates the world of the living and non-living, and paradise. It answers some questions that seem to be metaphysical, on a physical level, in a way that is understandable to the average person. The article is written using, whenever possible, Occam's Razor. In some places, common knowledge concepts have not been referred to literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his Commentary on Ptolemy's Harmonics , Porphyry debunks Ptolemy's quantitative theory of pitches by demonstrating that pitches are qualitative attributes of sound. I argue that Porphyry's main concern is to save the phenomenological dimension of sound while preserving the possibility of a quantitative analysis of music. I show how he draws on the Aristotelian tradition to develop a theory of pitches as emergent properties that covary with some underlying quantitative features without being reducible to them. Porphyry offers an original and compelling solution to the classic problem of how to provide a quantitative analysis of a qualitative phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

There has been virtual explosion of studies published in cognitive neuroscience primarily due to increased accessibility to neuroimaging methods, which has led to different approaches in interpretation. This review seeks to synthesize both developmental approaches and more recent views that consider neuroimaging. The ways in which Neuronal Recycling, Neural Reuse, and Language as Shaped by the Brain perspectives seek to clarify the brain bases of cognition will be addressed. Neuroconstructivism as an additional explanatory framework which seeks to bind brain and cognition to development will also be presented. Despite sharing similar goals, the four approaches to understanding how the brain is related to cognition have generally been considered separately. However, we propose that all four perspectives argue for a form of Emergentism in which combinations of smaller elements can lead to a greater whole. This discussion seeks to provide a synthesis of these approaches that leads to the emergence of a theory itself. We term this new synthesis Neurocomputational Emergentism (or Neuromergentism for short).

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid accumulation of plant trait data, major opportunities have arisen for the integration of these data into predicting ecosystem primary productivity across a range of spatial extents. Traditionally, traits have been used to explain physiological productivity at cell, organ, or plant scales, but scaling up to the ecosystem scale has remained challenging. Here, we show the need to combine measures of community-level traits and environmental factors to predict ecosystem productivity at landscape or biogeographic scales. We show how theory can extend the production ecology equation to enormous potential for integrating traits into ecological models that estimate productivity-related ecosystem functions across ecological scales and to anticipate the response of terrestrial ecosystems to global change. The integration of plant functional traits to improve predictions of ecosystem productivity holds many opportunities, especially considering that intrinsic links are expected between plant traits and ecosystem function. We present a novel framework for 'trait-based productivity' (TBP) enabling the prediction of productivity-related ecosystem functions from plant community traits and environmental conditions. The TBP framework takes an emergent perspective considering the ecosystem as a whole, in which individual plant traits scale up to community-scale 'traits' that in combination influence ecosystem functions. The TBP framework has potential to drive a new generation of ecological models at a wide range of spatial scales, informed by species' traits derived from open access trait databases and high-resolution remote sensing imagery data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent volume of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, Flavius Raslau proposes a new and intriguing integration of Palamite theology with key currents of thought in analytic philosophy of science. The aim of this comment is to provide a concise summary and assessment of Raslau's proposal, along the way making suggestions as to how it might be profitably amended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the target article, David Rose makes an interesting and substantive case against a certain kind of sceptical view: "veridical perception is impossible in principle," combined with a certain version of anti-realism. He proceeds by first illustrating several ideas from George Orwell's seminal work, and then proposes that a certain kind of non-reductive, levelled emergentist metaphysics can help us respond to such scepticism. In this commentary, I join forces with Rose's case, but will point out that we need to take seriously two discussions in contemporary philosophy in order to make the realist case stronger: the argument from illusion and hallucination, and the causal exclusion argument. Only then do Rose and his allies can have a more satisfactory case for objectivity and realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

First, I agree with Cheng that the argument from illusions to indirect realism is controversial, especially as to what is meant by "realism," "veridical," and "sense data" and the background assumptions underlying them. I provide a finer specification of some of the sub-movements that were the specific concerns of my previous article, particularly phenomenology as it currently sees itself in perception research, and the relevance of illusions. Perception has turned out to be far more complex than traditional philosophy realized, as has been revealed by recent research in neuroscience and psychophysics. Lastly, I answer Cheng's question about the "causal exclusion argument" by suggesting it is obviated by the temporal substructure of metaphysical states, and I provide a detailed supporting case in Supplementary Material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

This paper establishes that Robert Boyle's complex chemical ontology implies a non-reductionistic conception of chemical qualities and, more specifically, a conception of chemical qualities as being dispositional and relational. Though Peter Anstey has already shown that that Boyle considered sensible qualities to be dispositional and relational, this moves beyond Anstey's work by extending his arguments to chemical properties. These arguments are, however, merely a first step in establishing a non-reductionistic interpretation of Boyle's chemical ontology. A further argument will show that Boyle regards chemical and other higher-level properties as being emergent and supervenient properties. These arguments are supported by substantial textual evidence from Boyle's writings, which show that he clearly conceived of chemical substances as functional wholes whose properties emerge not only from the microstructural ordering of their parts but also from their relationship with other chemical substances within the context of experimental practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lewtas [2017] recently articulated an argument claiming that emergent conscious causal powers are impossible. In developing his argument, Lewtas makes several assumptions about emergence, phenomenal consciousness, categorical properties, and causation. We argue that there are plausible alternatives to these assumptions. Thus, the proponent of emergent conscious causal powers can escape Lewtas's challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

The three papers in the fourth section explore domain-general mechanisms underlying language abilities and shared processing resources that yield cross-domain effects. Keywords: emergentism; corpora; phonology; crosslinguistic; constructions; child language; second language acquisition EN emergentism corpora phonology crosslinguistic constructions child language second language acquisition 1 5 5 01/24/22 20220120 NES 220120 The articles in this Frontiers special issue use the analytic and theoretical tools of emergentism to explain a wide variety of language structures and processes. The five papers in the fifth and final section use large-scale corpora to study second language learning of English and bilingual language processing. [Extracted from the article]

Starting from a relatively brief --but hopefully understandable-- description of Michael Polanyi’s ideas about emergentism and complexity, we will present a perspective of scientific knowledge under the aegis of two of his most relevant maxims: i) we know more than we can talk about, ii) in general, we employ more ideas than we define concepts. We will propose a conception of science from his views on the inexact, tacit knowledge, the self-regulation of science, the network, and the society of explorers in order to show that complexity and emergentism (almost always synonymous with novelty) are guiding threads, rarely visible, that organize such a conception. Complexity and emergentism are theses that express some of the most relevant features of Polanyian thought, since they help to understand the relations between scientific knowledge and the way the society of explorers carries out its actions based on an intertwining between knowledge network and tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 (M age: 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]