Emergence, Reduction and Supervenience: A Varied Landscape

By Jeremy Butterfield. 2011

197 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This is one of two papers about emergence, reduction and supervenience. It expounds these notions and analyses the general relations between them. The companion paper analyses the situation in physics, especially limiting relations between physical theories.I shall take emergence as behaviour that is novel and robust relative to some comparison class. I shall take reduction as deduction using appropriate auxiliary definitions. And I shall take supervenience as a weakening of reduction, viz. to allow infinitely long definitions.The overall claim of this paper will be that emergence is logically independent both of reduction and of supervenience. In particular, one can have emergence with reduction, as well as without it; and emergence without supervenience, as well as with it.Of the subsidiary claims, the four main ones (each shared with some other authors) are: (i):I defend the traditional Nagelian conception of reduction (Sect. 3);(ii):I deny that the multiple realisability argument causes trouble for reductions, or “reductionism” (Sect. 4);(iii):I stress the collapse of supervenience into deduction via Beth’s theorem (Sect. 5.1);(iv):I adapt some examples already in the literature to show supervenience without emergence and vice versa (Sect. 5.2).

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Citations in the corpus

Less is Different: Emergence and Reduction Reconciled (2011, background): “However, this is a companion to another paper (Butterfield 2010).”
Approximation and Idealization: Why the Difference Matters* (2012, methodology): “For a recent defense of this form of reduction with similar applications intended, see Butterfield (2011a). well behaved.”