This article focuses on emergence in social systems. The author begins by proposing a new tool to explore the mechanisms of social emergence: multi agent–based computer simulation. He then draws on philosophy of mind to develop an account of social emergence that raises potential problems for the methodological individualism of both social mechanism and of multi agent simulation. He then draws on various complexity concepts to propose a set of criteria whereby one can determine whether a given social mechanism generates emergent properties, in the sense that their explanation cannot be reduced to a mechanistic account of individuals and their interactions. This combined account helps to resolve the competing claims of methodological individualists and social realists. The author’s conclusion is that the scope of mechanistic explanation may be limited due to the extreme complexity of many social systems.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Abbott, Andrew. 1995. Things of boundaries. Social Research62:857-882.
2.
Abbott, Andrew. 1996. Mechanisms and relations. Paper presented in the Conference on Social Mechanisms, Stockholm, Sweden.
3.
Archer, Margaret S. 1995. Realist social theory: The morphogenetic approach. New York: Cambridge University Press.
4.
Aronson, Jerrold L., Rom Harré, and Eileen Cornell Way. 1995. Realism rescued: How scientific progress is possible. Chicago: Open Court.
5.
Axelrod, Robert. 1997. The complexity of cooperation: Agent-based models of competition and collaboration. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
6.
Baas, Nils A. 1994. Emergence, hierarchies, and hyperstructures. In Artificial life III, SFI studies in the sciences of complexity, Proc. Vol. XVII, edited by Christopher G. Langton, 515-537. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
7.
Barth, Fredrik. 1981. Process and form in social life: Selected essays of Fredrik Barth. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
8.
Bechtel, William. 2001. The compatibility of complex systems and reduction: A case analysis of memory research. Minds and Machines11:483-502.
9.
Bechtel, William, and Robert C. Richardson. 1993. Discovering complexity: Decomposition and localization as strategies in scientific research. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
10.
Bhaskar, Roy. 1975/1997. A realist theory of science. New York: Verso Classics.
11.
Bhaskar, Roy.1979/1998. The possibility of naturalism. New York: Routledge.
Bunge, Mario. 1969/1973. The metaphysics, epistemology and methodology of levels. In Method, model, and matter, edited by Mario Bunge, 160-168. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: D. Riedel. (Adapted from Hierarchical structures, edited by Lancelot Law Whyte, Albert G. Wilson, and Donna Wilson, 17-28, New York: American Elsevier, 1969.)
16.
Bunge, Mario. 1977. General systems and holism. General Systems22:87-90.
17.
Bunge, Mario.1996. Finding philosophy in social science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
18.
Bunge, Mario.1997. Mechanism and explanation. Philosophy of the Social Sciences27:410-465.
19.
Bunge, Mario. 2004. How does it work? The search for explanatory mechanisms. Philosophy of the Social Sciences34:182-210.
20.
Cariani, Peter. 1991. Emergence and artificial life. In Artificial life II, SFI studies in the sciences of complexity, Vol. X, edited by C. G. Langton, C. Taylor, J. D. Farmer, and S. Rasmussen, 775-797. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
21.
Casti, John L. 1994. Complexification: Explaining a paradoxical world through the science of surprise. New York: Harper Collins.
22.
Cederman, Lars-Erik. 2002. Computational models of social forms: Advancing generative macro theory. Paper presented at Agents 2002: Social Agents: Ecology, Exchange, and Evolution, October 11-12, Chicago.
23.
Coleman, James S. 1990. Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
24.
Collins, Randall. 1981. On the microfoundations of macrosociology. American Journal of Sociology86:984-1014.
25.
Craver, Carl. 2001. Role functions, mechanisms and hierarchy. Philosophy of Science68:31-55.
26.
Craver, Carl.2002. Interlevel experiments and multilevel mechanisms in the neuroscience of memory. Philosophy of Science69: S83-S97.
27.
Darley, Vince. 1994. Emergent phenomena and complexity. In Artificial life IV, Proceedings of the fourth international workshop on the synthesis and simulation of living systems, edited by Rodney A. Brooks and Pattie Maes, 411-416. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
28.
Dupré, John. 1993. The disorder of things: Metaphysical foundations of the disunity of science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
29.
Dupuy, Jean-Pierre. 2000. The mechanization of the mind: On the origins of cognitive science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
30.
Durkheim, Émile. 1895/1964. The rules of sociological method. New York: Free Press. (Orig. pub. as Les régles de la mèthode sociologique, Paris: Alcan, 1895.)
31.
Ellis, Donald G. 1999. Research on social interaction and the micro-macro issue. Research on Language and Social Interaction32:31-40.
32.
Elster, Jon. 1989. Nuts and bolts for the social sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press.
33.
Craver, Carl. 1998. Aplea for mechanism. In Social mechanisms: An analytical approach to social theory, edited by Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg, 45-73. New York: Cambridge University Press.
34.
Emirbayer, Mustafa. 1997. Manifesto for a relational sociology. American Journal of Sociology103:281-317.
35.
Epstein, Joshua M. 1999. Agent-based computational models and generative social science. Complexity4:41-60.
36.
Epstein, Joshua M., and Robert Axtell. 1996. Growing artificial societies: Social science from the bottom up. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
37.
Fodor, Jerry A. 1974. Special sciences (Or: The disunity of science as a working hypothesis). Synthese28:97-115.
38.
Gell-Mann, Murray. 1994. The quark and the jaguar: Adventures in the simple and the complex. New York: W. H. Freeman.
39.
Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.
40.
Glennan, Stuart S. 1996. Mechanisms and the nature of causation. Erkenntnis44:49-71.
41.
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 1999. Procrustes probably: Comments on Sober’s “Physicalism from a probabilistic point of view.” Philosophical Studies95:175-181.
42.
Harré, Rom. 1970. The principles of scientific thinking. London: Macmillan.
43.
Hedström, Peter, and Richard Swedberg, eds. 1998. Social mechanisms: An analytical approach to social theory. New York: Cambridge University Press.
44.
Heil, John. 1998. Supervenience deconstructed. European Journal of Philosophy6:146-155.
45.
Heil, John. 1999. Multiple realizability. American Philosophical Quarterly36:189-208.
46.
Hempel, Carl G. 1965. Aspects of scientific explanation and other essays in the philosophy of science. New York: Free Press.
47.
Homans, George C. 1961. Social behavior: Its elementary forms. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World.
48.
Homans, George C.1964. Commentary. Sociological Inquiry34:221-231.
49.
Kauffman, Stuart A. 1993. The origins of order: Self-organization and selection in evolution. New York: Oxford University Press.
50.
Kim, Jaegwon. 1992. Multiple realizability and the metaphysics of reduction. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research52:1-26.
51.
Kim, Jaegwon.1997. The mind-body problem: Taking stock after forty years. Philosophical Perspectives11:185-207.
52.
Kincaid, Harold. 1997. Individualism and the unity of science. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
53.
Lawler, Edward J., Cecilia Ridgeway, and Barry Markovsky. 1993. Structural social psychology and the micro-macro problem. Sociological Theory11:268-290.
54.
Layder, Derek. 1990. The realist image in social science. New York: St. Martin’s.
55.
Little, Daniel. 1998. Microfoundations, method and causation: On the philosophy of the social sciences. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
56.
Machamer, Peter, Lindley Darden, and Carl F. Craver. 2000. Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science67:1-25.
57.
Macy, Michael W., and Robert Willer. 2002. From factors to actors: Computational sociology and agent-based modeling. Annual Review of Sociology28:143-166.
58.
McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. 2001. Dynamics of contention. New York: Cambridge University Press.
59.
McIntyre, Lee C. 1996. Laws and explanation in the social sciences: Defending a science of human behavior. Boulder, CO: Westview.
60.
Meyer, D. A., and T. A. Brown. 1998. Statistical mechanics of voting. Physical Review Letters81:1718-1721.
61.
Miller, Richard W. 1987. Fact and method: Explanation, confirmation and reality in the natural and the social sciences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
62.
Nicolis, G., and I. Prigogine. 1977. Self-organization in nonequilibrium systems. NewYork: John Wiley.
63.
Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The social system. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
64.
Parsons, Talcott. 1970. Onbuilding social system theory: Apersonal history. Daedalus99:826-881.
65.
Parsons, Talcott, and Edward A. Shils. 1951. Values, motives, and systems of action. In Toward a general theory of action, edited by Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils, 47-275. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
66.
Phillips, D. C. 1976. Holistic thought in social science. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
67.
Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. 1984. Order out of chaos: Man’s new dialogue with nature. New York: Bantam.
68.
Putnam, Hilary. 1967. Psychological predicates. In Art, mind, and religion: Proceedings of the 1965 Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy, edited byW. H. Capitan and D. D. Merrill, 37-48. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
69.
Rawls, Anne Warfield. 1987. The interaction order sui generis: Goffman’s contribution to social theory. Sociological Theory5:136-149.
70.
Rawls, Anne Warfield. 1990. Emergent sociality: Adialectic of commitment and order. Symbolic Interaction13:63-82.
71.
Ritzer, George, and Pamela Gindoff. 1992. Methodological relationism: Lessons for and from social psychology. Social Psychology Quarterly55:128-140.
72.
Sawyer, R. Keith. 2001. Emergence in sociology: Contemporary philosophy of mind andsome implications for sociological theory. American Journal of Sociology107:551-585.
73.
Sawyer, R. Keith. 2002a. Durkheim’s dilemma: Towarda sociology of emergence. Sociological Theory20:227-247.
74.
Sawyer, R. Keith.2002b. Nonreductive individualism, Part 1: Supervenience and wild disjunction. Philosophy of the Social Sciences32:537-559.
75.
Sawyer, R. Keith. 2002c. Unresolved tensions in sociocultural theory: Analogies with contemporary sociological debates. Culture & Psychology8:283-305.
76.
Sawyer, R. Keith. 2003a. Artificial societies: Multi agent systems and the micro-macro link in sociological theory. Sociological Methods and Research31:37-75.
77.
Sawyer, R. Keith. 2003b. Communication matters: Agent communication languages and emergence in artificial societies. Manuscript, Washington University, St. Louis, MO.
78.
Sawyer, R. Keith.2003c. Improvised dialogues: Emergence and creativity in conversation. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
79.
Sawyer, R. Keith. 2003d. Nonreductive individualism, Part 2: Social causation. Philosophy of the Social Sciences33:203-224.
80.
Simmel, Georg. 1950. The sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press.
81.
Simon, Herbert A. 1969. The sciences of the artificial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
82.
Smart, J. J. C. 1981. Physicalism and emergence. Neuroscience6:109-113.
83.
Stinchcombe, Arthur L. 1991. The conditions of fruitfulness of theorizing about mechanisms in social science. Philosophy of the Social Sciences21:367-388.
84.
Von Neumann, John. 1949/1966. Theory and organization of complicated automata. In Theory of self-reproducing automata, edited by Arthur W. Burks, 29-87. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. (Orig. presented as five lectures delivered at the University of Illinois in December 1949.)
85.
Watkins, J. W. N. 1957. Historical explanation in the social sciences. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science8:104-117.
86.
Wight, Colin. 2004. Theorizing the mechanisms of conceptual and semiotic space. Philosophy of the Social Sciences34:283-299.
87.
Wimsatt, William C. 1976. Reductionism, levels of organization, and the mind-body problem. In Consciousness and the brain, edited by G. G. Globus, G. Maxwell, and I. Slavodnik, 199-267. New York: Plenum.
88.
Wimsatt, William C. 1986. Forms of aggregativity. In Human nature and natural knowledge, edited by Alan Donagan, Anthony N. Perovich Jr., and Michael V. Wedin, 259-291. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: D. Riedel.
89.
Wimsatt, William C. 1997. Aggregativity: Reductive heuristics for finding emergence. Philosophy of Science64 (Proceedings): S372-S384.
90.
Wolfram, Stephen. 1985. Undecidability and intractability in theoretical physics. Physical Review Letters54:735-738.
91.
Wolfram, Stephen. 2002. A new kind of science. Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media.
