Also, if you look at what I wrote I said you may be trying to add too much precision, by which I meant more precision than is necessary for the term to be meaningful and useful. And more precision than is even appropriate. If the goal is to give a dictionary definition, which in this case it is, it should reflect the precision (or lack thereof) with which the term is used.

That said, sure we should be precise, as precise as we can presently be with a term. But just because we can’t be as precise in our definitions as you’d like that doesn’t mean the term is vacuous, has no extension, etc.. I have given what I take to be a reasonable few descriptions which are precise enough to give a sense for how the term is actually used in practice.

I think you may be right that ultimately the extension of the term as presently used may end up with a rough set of necessary and sufficient conditions, perhaps involving complexity of interactions, also likely strength of interactions among parts, complexity of the emerged phenomenon, and that this polydimensional creature will create a space in which certain regions are clearly instances of emergence, others not, and some just unclear.

I’m really saying two things. As used, it is a perfectly reasonable term even if we can’t give a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Secondly, a dictionary definition is not the place to work that stuff out, but to give a definition that is as precise as is responsible given present usage.

Note Pete’s ‘key terms’ book is not the same as a dictionary, so I may be wrong in this sentiment. But to dismiss it as vacuous just because we can’t make the old-school analytic philosophers happy with a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the use of a term…that’s just silly.

I’m just following the definitions that were given, which I quoted. On those definitions, mass, volume, etc. are all emergent. The definitions don’t say that emergent properties are more specific than non-relational properties.

There probably are good, mathematically rigorous and scientifically responsible analyses of emergence. I suspect notions of complexity (also troublesome) will play some crucial role. But none of the discussion so far gets even close.

If aiming for precision is silly, then philosophy is silly.

All of us should either aim to get it right or just not bother to do it at all.

And that goes for me, too.

Well, we have one clear use: insoluble equations. That is mathematically nonarbitrary, though ontologically it is arbitrary (that is, the actual systems described by such equations are not any more inherently interesting or complex than those described by solvable linear equations).

Mass and volume: red herrings.The mass of X (composed of a bunch of Ys) is a sum of the masses of the Ys. It is to change the subject to start to talk about the ‘origins of mass.’

And with volume similar just tendentious and overconfident. Sure, PV=nRT in gases. Fine. have a block of glass with a certain volume. I add a bunch of such blocks together.

Emergent isn’t the same as relational. Being 20 feet from is a relational property, but not emergent.

I have the feeling that this is a good case where scientists and others are using the term in a perfectly vanilla, relatively uninteresting, but not vacuous way, but the philosophers are jumping all around demanding more because of the history of the term within philosophy. It has a new meaning, but it is like we are saying we think gods exist or something when we use this silly little term. Properties emerge when things interact with one another. We need a word for this, and many use the word ‘emergent’ for that higher-level property.

There is gray area, but so what. This is getting silly.

I’m seeing things like an emergent feature is one of the “features of a system that are produced via the interaction and organization of its parts” (quoted above by Eric Thomson). Or from Andy Clark, “a phenomenon is emergent if it is best understood by attention to the changing values of a collective variable” where a collective variable is a “variable that tracks a pattern resulting from the interactions among multiple elements in a system.” (quoted above by Gary Williams). Or “the arising of a property in a relatively unpredictable way from the interaction of other properties” (quoted by Mandik at the start). Of course, Mandik properly criticizes the vacuity of “relatively”.

It’s alleged that mass isn’t emergent. How’s that? Nobody understands the origins of mass (and if it comes from some sort of Higgs mechanism, then it certainly seems to be emergent on all these definitions). And consider issues involving inertia. It would seem that the mass of anything is utterly dependent on the masses of all other things in the entire universe, all interacting via gravity.

It’s alleged that volume isn’t emergent. Volume of a gas? Well that depends on temperature and pressure, both of which involve interactions. pv = nrt, as they say. The volume of any material thing depends on all sorts of forces. Forces involve interactions.

On these definitions, the only properties that arent’ emergent are the intrinsic (non-relational) properties of pure ontological simples. I have no idea what the simples would be or what there basic intrinsic properties would be. Are the simples the basic particles in the Standard Model, that is, quarks and leptons? Their charges seem to be mediated by bosons - thus charge is emergent. I have no idea which properties would be non-emergent. Spin maybe?

And the possibility remains that all physical properties are relational. If that’s true, then indeed they all do emerge from interactions with other things.

I’d happily accept a definition that says P is emergent iff P is defined by a non-linear equation, or by an equation of this or that form. That’s at least clear. But it’s hardly what people seem to have in mind.

So I stand by my claim that emergence as defined here is utterly vacuous.

Where you might get a contradiction is with a linear system whose equations have an analytical solution, but in which “interesting” behavior emerges due to the interaction of the parts. E.g., this can happen in electrical circuits. The people who like the ‘property that emerges due to the interaction of parts’ people would call that emergence, the ‘we must simulate the system to see how it works’ people would not. I’d personally be happy to call it emergent, as the soluble equations formulation seems sort of arbitrary, but at least it does connect with the old-school notion of predictability used by the emergentists. (For me it seems arbitrary as it seems to confuse the formal and material modes of speaking, and many of the neo-emergentists use the material mode, so the types of equations involved don’t matter, but the properties and how they are generated).

I’m not sure if temperature would be considered emergent by the pro-emergentists, but unclear cases don’t make the distinction vacuous.

A collective variable is a “variable that tracks a pattern resulting from the interactions among multiple elements in a system.”

This explanatory definition thus cuts across all the arguments what whether something is *really* emergent or not. Emergence just turns out to be a theoretical stance that happens to be useful for explaining some phenomena and not others. It is really just a special case of reductive explanation, except it different in the *ways* that low-level properties interact to bring about higher-level ones.

But there is a second more innocuous sense used by many that I also mentioned: even if we could predict the higher-level feature or whatever, we’d call it emergent because it comes about due to the interaction of a bunch of parts organized a certain way.