The Explanatory and Ontological Autonomy of Weak Emergence

Mark Bedau and Timothy Doyle
University of California, Davis

Emergent properties have two general hallmarks: (i) they are dependent on underlying properties, and (ii) they are autonomous from underlying properties. "Strong" emergent properties, which are supervenient macro-properties with irreducible causal powers, play no constructive role in empirical science. By contrast, "weak" emergent properties, the causal powers of which are reducible but in complex ways, are ubiquitous in empirical science. The main challenge for weak emergence is to provide something more than merely epistemological autonomy. This paper defends the explanatory and ontological autonomy of a version of weak emergence.