In his early work, the concept of emergence really comes to the fore in Bhaskar’s analysis of the social world. The concept of emergence consistently runs through Bhaskar’s work, beginning with the concept of stratification in a Realist Theory of Science, progressing through his concept of society in The Possibility of Naturalism, and reaching its culmination in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom in a metaphysical system defined by emergence. Strong emergence and stratification – The Possibility of Naturalism (Roy Bhaskar) For the sake of simplicity I will call these “strong emergence” and “relational emergence”.
#Emergent phenomena anderson series
How does emergence help us to think through issues in social theory, sociology, and social science? Since the webinar the other week with Philip Gorski ( available here) I have been contemplating a series of interrelated questions: how do we understand the relationship between wholes and parts when applied to social phenomena? How are emergence, stratification, composition, and causation related? What is the place of downward causation in social analysis and how is it different from linear causation? Are there different kinds and degrees of emergence? Leaving the question of morphogenesis for another day and another post, in thinking through these issues two important interpretations of emergence have been put forward within the critical realist literature which I will explore here.
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