Classic Paper: Causality And Emergence
E:CO Issue Vol. 15 No. 1 2013 pp. 96-112
Classical
Classic Paper Section
CAUSALITY AND EMERGENCE
Dilman W. Gotshalk (with an introduction by Jeffrey Goldstein)
Originally published as Gotshalk, D.W. (1942). “Causality and emergence,” Philosophical Review, 51(4): 397-405. Reprinted with kind permission.
EMERGENCE, QUALITY, AND THE
LIMITATIONS OF ORDINARY NOVELTY
There is nothing new in novelty ...
C. W. Berenda (1953)
D
Gotshalk’s Proto-emergentism
ilman Walter Gotshalk, who lived from 1901 to 1973 (see Gotshalk’s brief bio
at de Waal, 2005), spent his career as a philosopher at the University of Illinois. His doctoral dissertation at Cornell University, “The Problem of Mind
and Objects in the Philosophies of Samuel Alexander and Ernst Cassirer” reveals how
steeped in emergentist thought Gotshalk was from the very beginning, since Alexander was one of the chief conceptual architects of Emergent Evolutionism in England
and America. This loosely joined intellectual movement in the first half of the twentieth century expanded and elaborated upon precursor concepts of emergence found
in the works of Henri Bergson, William James, and others, which straddle the end of
the Nineteenth Century on into the Twentieth (see Blitz, 1992; Goldstein, 1999). Gotshalk’s aesthetically-tinged approach to emergence followed Alexander’s (1966) emphasis on the emergence of new qualities and forms.
Gotshalk’s status as a philosopher could be seen in his steady rise within the hierarchy of the American Philosophical Association, eventually becoming one of the
preeminent philosophers of aesthetics of his day. That Gotshalk wrote the accompanying classic paper focusing on the relation of emergence to aesthetic issues such as
96 | Gotshalk & Goldstein
the nature of quality, plus the fact that this paper was published in one of the premier
philosophy journals of the time (and ours as well), are two more indications of just
how significant the idea of emergence had become in Anglo-American thought during the first half of the twentieth century. Although thinking about emergence during
those early years was an armchair pursuit of speculation, occurring long before the
beginning of scientific research into emergent phenomena in complex systems, it is
rather remarkable, in my opinion, not only how popular the idea was proving to be in
philosophical considerations, but also by how many of the issues concerning emergence that philosophers and scientists grapple with today were foreshadowed, and
even substantively resolved, during the Proto-emergentist period. Too much ink and
paper have been wasted in philosophy journals over the past twenty years on “reinventing the wheel” in the philosophical investigation of emergence.
Gotshalk’s main areas of focus within philosophy were aesthetics and metaphysics;
his aim being to anchor the former in the latter’s understanding of ontology. For Gotshalk, aesthetics was not adequately understood as about something epiphenomenal
but, rather, was an exploration of the inherent qualitative side of reality in general. As
Gotshalk (1929: 650) put it in another of his papers, “The particular qualities and relations as well as the particular things and events into which it is thus differentiated are
there in existence and in a full existential content apart from whether they are as yet
expressed in concepts or not.” This aesthetically-charged theme of emergentism was
widely found among other proto-emergentists like C. L. Morgan, Roy Wood Sellars,
John Boodin, and so forth who conceived emergence as a way to metaphysically validate the ontological role of value, worth, and quality in a world otherwise understood
primarily through the lens of scientific mechanism (see Blitz, 1992).
B
MEAD, BERGSON, GOTSHALK AND THE
DICHOTOMIZATION OF REALITY
esides Alexander’s quality-framed brand of emergentism, the more immediate
influence on Gotshalk’s philosophy of emergence was the work of George Herbert Mead, another key metaphysician of Emergent Evolutionism (see a classic
paper from Mead in a past issue of E:CO along with my introduction at Goldstein
- Mead, 2007). Mead conceived emergence in two related contexts, that of the self
emerging out of a matrix of social interaction (Mead’s breakthrough social-psychology) and temporal unfolding (the radicalness of Mead’s emergent temporality is highlighted in Goldstein, 2007). In explicating Gotshalk’s particular take on emergence it is
helpful to elaborate on Mead’s conceptual device of dichotomizing reality by first taking a short digression to Bergson’s earlier Manichean explanatory strategy (see ColE:CO Vol. 15 No. 1 2013 pp. 96-112 | 97
lins, 1965; Haeger, 2010, who points out the influence of Romanticism on Bergson’s
manner of conceptualizing issues).
Although Bergson’s explicit emergentism is rarely touched on in expositions of his
philosophy (for I don’t know what reason), Bergson had coined a term in French which
seems to me at least to be identical to emergence: the French expression fait jaillir
for “springing or sprouting up” (Bergson, 1907) which was translated in the English
edition of Creative Evolution (1913) into the more condensed “upspringing”. Bergson
expounded what he meant by “upspringing” through the erection of a set of ultraoppositions (see Figure 1) with the list on each side set against the other in terms of
purported ontological priority and significance:
Science
Intellect
Space (continuous)
Determinism
Mechanism
Parts
Repetition
CAUSALITY
Experience
Intuition
Time (durée)
Freedom
Organicity
Wholes
Novelty
“UPSPRINGING”
(Fr: fait jaillir)
EMERGENCE
Figure 1 Bergson’s and Mead’s Conceptual Oppositions for Emergence
As can be seen in Figure 1, upspringing” is associated with such features as durée (Bergson’s expression for lived time of duration, or what’s been called the “thickness” of the temporal moment), experience, and organicity in opposition to continuity,
science, and mechanism. The most glaring antipode concerning emergence that has
arisen from such a dichotomization of reality is an assumed clash between the 2nd
Law of Thermodynamics and its concomitant Entropy Increase (understood in terms of
Boltzmann’s order degradation) and emergence representing the arising of new order
in nature. Not only was Bergson adamant about this antithesis throughout his writings, the opposition has persistently dogged many an attempt to come to a credible
philosophical and scientific account of emergence as seen, e.g., in recent calls for the
need of additional new (4th, 5th, 6th,...) Law(s) of Thermodynamics that could support
the emergentist tenet of a building up, not demolition of order.
98 | Gotshalk & Goldstein
Gotshalk’s causality could of course be included on the list on the left since it is
how science goes about explanations through the ideas of a continuous causal chain
and mechanistic linkages between each segment of the causal chain. Like the rest of
the Bergsonian/Meadian oppositions, for Gotshalk, the characteristics listed on the
left column did not provide any space for the emergence of quality and individuality.
Attempting to extend Mead’s forays in reconciling emergence with the left column,
Gotshalk held that a more sensible and complete view of reality would need to include
both causality in this sense plus emergence since “...emergence is testimony that the
individual and the qualitative are not eradicated by the operation of causes, but that
these factors are as much present after the operation of causes as they plainly were
before this operation” and “the emergent, the novel, the individual, that which is discontinuous with the past, [is] a definitive or ultimate element of the real.”
Although Gotshalk aimed at such a complementary resolution of the oppositions,
it doesn’t seem to me he got very far in offering a plausible account of exactly how
such complementarity was to be effectuated. The problem lies, I propose, in the very
Manichean conceptualization of emergence that Bergson/Mead (and other emergentist thinkers then and now) had put forward. To get more specific, for one, the structure of oppositions presumes that each item on the left and the right are about the
same issue or on the same conceptual level. For example, does each item on the left
correspond precisely to the issue expressed by the item on the right? E.g., are parts
and wholes about the same issue or do they, by definition exist on different conceptual levels? Or, do continuity and durée address the same philosophical topic? And,
two, why should philosophical alternatives be restricted to just two options on the opposite ends of a spectrum? Why can’t they include all the points between the opposites, or even something altogether different, and on a very different conceptual level?
I suppose that one of the sources for this kind of oppositional scheme was dialectics,
especially that trumpeted by Hegel and neo-Hegelians, of which several of Bergson’s
teachers were advocates. But this traps thinking into dialectical antitheses which have
all sorts of philosophical problems.
Furthermore, it seems to me that Manichean frameworks such as used by Bergson, Mead, and Gotshalk following their lead tend to force each of the opposites into
a rigid category which disallows further thinking about the degree of, measure of,
interpretation of, and so forth, the meaning of the oppositional category. One important case in point that I shall further explore below is just what degree of continuity
or discontinuity characterizes the antipode categories. For example, just how much
discontinuity is required for emergents to emerge from a background of continuity,
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and just how continuous is causal continuity assumed to be? These questions are important because they point to a crucial issue that Gotshalk did not take up but which
has the potential of rendering what he meant by emergence into the mere outcome
of ordinary novelty accompanying ordinary processes of change, an issue to which we
now turn.
ORDINARY NOVELTY AND EMERGENT NOVELTY
A
ccording to Gotshalk, emergent novelty was an expression of the ontologically basic nature of quality and individuality; two features of reality which are
not recognized if the causal continuity explanatory scheme of science were
the whole story. Consequently, what emergence can provide is enough discontinuity in causal continuity to open-up an interregnum, so to speak, where individuality
and quality may come into view. But, although it is nowhere clearly described in this
classic paper, the discontinuity associated with emergence appears to be ubiquitous
and incumbent upon any process of change at all, since newness always implies some
measure of discontinuity.
But if emergence is associated with every kind of ordinary change, it cannot
amount to anything of lasting import since it then becomes a trivial synonym for
change. Emergent phenomena, of course, are characterized not just by novelty but
also by what I (Goldstein, 1999) have described as the properties of coordination or
integration, dynamical, ostensive, and so on. But if we here concentrate only on novelty due to restrictions on the length of this introduction, we are presented with the
fact that we cannot get a handle on the kind of novelty that Gotshalk would think to
be necessary for emergence.
To better appreciate what I am getting at here, let’s take a look at three series
which illustrate different types of ordinary novelty generation (see Figure 2):
Series A: &, &, &, &, &, &, &, & ...
Series B: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 ...
Series C: ζ, $, #, %, *, +, Ǝ, ɖ, Ֆ ...
Figure 2 Generating Novelty.
Three Series of Novelty Generation.
Series A is composed of repeated ampersands, e.g., accomplished by a program
to simply print &’s at (approximately) 0.25” intervals to the right, and continue doing
so indefinitely. It is true each successive “&” is new since it is both printed anew and is
100 | Gotshalk & Goldstein
placed in a new location to the right. The philosopher Paul Teller (1992) in discussing
emergence offered an example of this kind of trite novelty: if it happens prior to the
manufacturing of a marble that no spherical object has previously had a mass of exactly 10.74218 grams and one is then produced to have this mass, this mass is a novel
property. It is novel because it was never manufactured before, at least by the company in question, and has also transgressed the quality standards in place. The new
marble is unexpected, but we’re still within the confines of ordinary novelty despite
this unexpectedness since the discontinuity of this new marble is minimal. Hence, Series A is certainly not the kind of the novelty emergentists have in mind.
In Series B each successive number to the right is new in the sense both that it is
now in a new place 0.25” further to the right, and it is a different number than the one
preceding it by being 1 more than that previous number. The new number is thereby
continuous with and built out of the previous sequence. This second type of novelty
may express a greater degree of innovation than Series A, yet it is also clearly not the
kind of novelty required in a credible approach to emergence, since it remains predictable and deducible from the previous numbers and can accordingly be reduced back
to its antecedents by successively, in reverse order, subtracting 1.
In Series C, each succeeding new symbol to the right is new not just because it is
printed in a new location, it also new because it is a very different shape than the preceding ones. But there is no discernible rule for the generation of each new symbol.
This means that each new symbol in the series is quite novel, it does not seem to be
built out of the previous symbol. For example, it might the result of some sort of randomization—one could imagine some apparatus for selecting new symbols from an
infinite supply of them by way of suitably rigged apparatus hooked up to a radioactive
substance. A random process may produce novel outcomes, but that doesn’t make it
emergence.
It appears to me that Gothalk’s proposal concerning emergence in opposition to
causality might correspond to either Series A, Series B, or Series C. Yet, as we’ve seen,
these three series don’t demonstrate the generation of the kind of novelty required
for emergence. Series A and Series B represent ordinary change and ordinary novelty,
and Series C represents the kind of novelty that results from mere randomization but
that does not show a generative operation like what would be required in a credible
approach to emergence.
What Gotshalk would need to have supplied (along with his descriptions of individuality and quality as well as how emergence was depicted as an extreme antipode
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to causality) was some insight into both the kinds of discontinuity necessary to distinguish emergence from mere ordinary change, as well as how generative processes
could operate on and build emergent novelty out of some antecedent or substrate
condition.
D
CONCLUSION
espite the several conceptual inadequacies found in Gotshalk’s approach to
emergence that we have discussed above, we are reprinting his classic paper for several reasons. First, Gotshalk’s paper is one more testimony to how
important emergence was considered during the Proto-emergentist phase. That is,
emergence was not a backwater idea, but was discussed vigorously in philosophical
circles in the context of the really big philosophical issues of ontology, aesthetics, the
philosophy of science, etc. In fact, the more I have learned about the early emergentists and their writings, the more I have found to admire. There was a great deal of
good thinking going on; much of which foreshadows the much later usage of the idea
of emergence in complexity science. And this was done without the benefits of the
exciting findings in complexity research concerning emergent phenomena.
A downside to the armchair nature of Proto-emergentism, was a tendency to cosmicize emergence into a Grand Principle of Nature, a position that in my opinion has
served to detract from both the plausibility of the concept as well as the applicability of it. Indeed, this trend of making emergence into a highfalutin idea is also not
uncommon among some contemporary complexity theorists; the drive in both cases
being presumably the desire to protect such inviolable qualities in nature as value,
worth, even dignity. But there is no law mandating that physicists only develop sound
metaphysics or physicians make good metaphysicians.
Furthermore, from Gotshalk’s perspective of aesthetic primordiality, quality and
individuality are as fundamental as causality in characterizing the world, so that emergence does not so much bring quality and individuality into existence as it a process
of uncovering what is already inherent in reality. This is a laudable position to take but
it needs much more careful thinking concerning whether emergence is an ontological
or epistemological phenomenon, a subject which is still being hotly debated not just
in philosophical circles but now, because of complexity theory, among scientists as
well.
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