Neither Weak, Nor Strong? Emergence and Functional Reduction

Abstract

The clarification of the concept of emergence has long been on the agenda of the metaphysics of science; notions such as ‘irreducibility’, ‘novelty’ and ‘unpredictability’ have been invoked in an attempt to better circumscribe this notoriously elusive idea. This paper joins this effort, by examining a class of familiar physical processes, such as boiling and freezing—generically called ‘phase transitions’—since many philosophers and physicists take them to be good candidates of emergent phenomena. While I am broadly sympathetic to this view, in this paper I ask what kind of emergence they instantiate. I am asking this question because I would like to argue that the two kinds of emergence currently identified in the metaphysics literature, ‘weak’ and ‘strong’, do not adequately characterize these phenomena.