Erica Onnis

Metaphysicians generally agree that ontologically emergent entities (properties, relations, objects, or processes) depend on lower-level goings-on while maintaining some autonomy and manifesting some sort of novelty in relation to them. Yet, there is no agreement about how to understand these commonly recognized features more precisely.

During my research stay, I shall focus on novelty, a concept that in the contemporary metaphysical debate has been consistently interpreted in causal terms. Within this framework, a phenomenon is strongly emergent when it depends on its components and has some novel causal powers. The project aims to demonstrate that the causal interpretation of novelty may be fruitfully integrated with a non-causal one to have more appropriate conceptual tools to investigate emergence outside metaphysics and, specifically, in complex systems.

The causal account of emergence belongs to a metaphysics of emergence that has its roots in the 1990s’ philosophy of mind. However, when complexity is at issue, rather than causal novelty, a “non-primarily-causal” type of novelty that I suggest calling “qualitative” and associate with the appearance of new patterns and structures should be taken into consideration as well. Indeed, while several metaphysicians recognize causal properties as the hallmark of ontological emergence, most complexity scientists direct their attention to special organizations, namely to “structural” properties (spatiotemporal patterns, symmetries, biological structures, and so on).

During my stay, I shall develop the thesis that while new causal properties surely represent a striking kind of ontological novelty, in material systems such as organisms, they must be priorly realized by appropriate structural properties whose emergent status should be properly investigated. By doing so, it will be delineated a pluralist metaphysics of emergence capable of framing in a more appropriate way complex systems and their plural epistemologies.