TY - JOUR
T1 - Humeanism, Best System Laws, and Emergence
AU - Sartenaer, Olivier
N1 - Funding Information:
I would like to thank Anthony Fisher, Alexandre Guay, Vera Hoffmann-Kolss, Paul Humphreys, Andreas Hüttemann, Christian Loew, Quentin Ruyant, Christoph Schmidt-Petri, Emily Thomas, Peter Verdée, and two anonymous referees of this journal for helpful comments or discussions on earlier versions of (parts of) this article, as well as the audiences of the Köln Kolloquium Wissenschaftstheorie, the Louvain Emergence Mini-Workshop and the GAP.10 conference, where parts of this article have been presented. I also gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
PY - 2019/10/1
Y1 - 2019/10/1
N2 - In the current article and contrary to a widespread assumption, I argue that Humeanism and ontological emergence can peacefully coexist. Such a coexistence can be established by reviving elements of John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of science, in which an idiosyncratic account of diachronic emergence is associated with extensions of the Humean mosaic and the correlative coming into being of new best system laws, which have the peculiarity of being temporally indexed. Incidentally, this reconciliation of Humeanism and emergence allows for conceiving the autonomy of the special sciences in an interesting way, consistently with the reductionist ideal of a unified science.
AB - In the current article and contrary to a widespread assumption, I argue that Humeanism and ontological emergence can peacefully coexist. Such a coexistence can be established by reviving elements of John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of science, in which an idiosyncratic account of diachronic emergence is associated with extensions of the Humean mosaic and the correlative coming into being of new best system laws, which have the peculiarity of being temporally indexed. Incidentally, this reconciliation of Humeanism and emergence allows for conceiving the autonomy of the special sciences in an interesting way, consistently with the reductionist ideal of a unified science.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85072878521&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - https://doi.org/10.1086/704979
DO - https://doi.org/10.1086/704979
M3 - Article
SN - 0031-8248
VL - 86
SP - 719
EP - 738
JO - Philosophy of Science
JF - Philosophy of Science
IS - 4
ER -