Carl Gillett, “Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
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What is the central debate between reductionism and emergence introduced in the episode?
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Hello,
and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talese, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Carl Gillett, professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois University. His new book, Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy, is just out from Cambridge University Press. Are complex phenomena nothing but the sum of their parts? Or are they more than the sum of their parts?
Physicists, chemists, and biologists, including notably neuroscientists, as well as philosophers, have long argued on both sides of this debate between the idea of reduction and that of emergence. At this point, argues Gillett, the sides have reached a stalemate where it is difficult to know in what ways the sides fundamentally disagree about the nature of the relation between a composite whole and its parts. In this ambitious book, he aims to break the stalemate by providing needed clarification about the issues that divide contemporary reductionists from contemporary emergentists. And he lays out the strongest positions that both sides should take. He uses his framework to provide a platform for future philosophical and scientific inquiry to help reorient the debate towards fruitful empirical tests that might decide which view is more plausible in given cases.
And he points the way towards new issues regarding the nature of collectives and the discontinuities and continuities in nature. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Carl Gillett. Are you there?
Hi, Carrie. I'm here.
Hi. Welcome to New Books and Philosophy.
Great. Thanks for inviting me.
I'm happy to have you on New Books and Philosophy. You've presented us with a very ambitious book that tries to end a stalemate in both philosophical circles and scientific circles in terms of very long-standing debate between reductionists and emergentists. One of the ways you initially characterize the debate now is in terms of, you know, reductionists have this long-standing view about, you know, a whole is nothing but the sum of its parts. There's sort of a connection there between the idea of, you know, a collective is just its parts. And then the emergentist view, which is, you know, had a sort of a much more checkered, you know, metaphysical, philosophical history in terms of making an emergent view coherent.
And as you put it, the modern or contemporary emergentist view is not quite that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, but more something like, you know, parts behave differently when they're in wholes.
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