Émergence et causalité descendante dans les sciences de l'esprit

Our first aim in this article is to draw up a general and descriptive overview of modern views of the relationship of body and mind. We emphasise in particular the way in which the classical controversy between dualists and monists at the end of the 1960's was transferred from the field of ontology and from the problematic of the constitution [of the mind] to that of epistemology and the problematic of the construction of theoretical models. On the basis of an idealised example of a reduction of a psychological theory to a neurobiological theory, we explicitate some of the reasons for this kind of shifting of the controversy, the essential correlate of which consists in the advent of new concepts for the relationship body-mind, unified under the nowadays widespread title of «non-reductive physicalism». We then point out the way this new type of antireductionist discourse constitutes a revisitation of the vocabulary of the emergence, inherited from the school of British emergentism at the start of the 20th century. Finally, we situate the controversy concerning the body-mind relationship at the present time: inter-level causation, and more particularly downward causation (transl. J. Dudley).