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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 1: "Condensed Metaphysics" I: Reduction and Emergence

AGPhil 1.4: Invited Talk

Monday, March 26, 2012, 12:15–13:00, E 020

Functional Reduction and Emergence — •Sorin Bangu — Univ. of Illinois, 801 S Wright St., Urbana, IL 61801, USA

The clarification of the concept of emergence has long been on the agenda of the metaphysics of science; notions such as 'novelty', 'unpredictability' and, most specifically, 'irreducibility' have been invoked in an attempt to elucidate this notoriously elusive idea. This paper aims to join this effort, by discussing a class of familiar phenomena, such as boiling and freezing - generically called 'phase transitions'. Recent work on this topic takes these processes as uncontroversial examples of emergent, or irreducible phenomena. I am broadly sympathetic to this view, but I argue that a better understanding of the emergence claim can be gained by clarifying how one of the best models of reduction on offer - Kim's 'functional' model - deals with these phenomena.