Appearance and Persistence as the Unity of Diachronic and Synchronic Concepts of Emergence

摘要

Recent philosophical discourse on emergence has developed with particular concern for the distinction between weak and strong emergence (e.g., Bedau 1997; Chalmers 2002) and with the primary focus on detailed analysis of the concept of supervenience (e.g., Kim 1984; 1999; McLaughlin 1997). However, in the last decade and as a new departure, attention has been devoted to the distinction between synchronic and diachronic emergence (e.g., Humphreys 2008a, b; Kirchhoff 2014). In this philosophical context, there is an ongoing general belief that these two concepts (diachronic and synchronic) are so different that it is impossible to establish for them a general unifying framework (Humphreys 2016a, b). It is the purpose of this paper to support an alternative view, i.e. that these concepts are different but not mutually exclusive, and that attending to appearance and persistence can, in this context, lead to an acceptable unifying framework for these two, differing concepts of emergence.