The Emergence of the Social Level of Reality

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The Emergence of the Social Level of Reality

• Mark H. Bickhard
• mark_at_bickhard.name
• http//bickhard.ws/

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Emergence?

• New properties resultant from global organization
  and relations of processes
• Downward causation
• Not possible to account for emergence in a
  particle or substance metaphysics
• Kims argument
• And its dissolution

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Agents

• Autonomous process organizations
• Necessarily far from equilibrium
• Necessarily open
• Necessarily interactive
• In ways that are sensitive to environment

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Complex Agents

• Maintain and update (apperception) knowledge of
  situation in the form of organizations of
  conditional potentialities for further
  interaction
• If I walk over to the refrigerator
• I can get a drink out of it
• Childs toy block

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Apperception

• Based on perceptual interactions
• Agent interactions
• Temporal flow

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Social Ontology

• Two agents, in each others interactive
  environment
• How can they apperceive their situations?

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Reflexiveness

• The interactive potentialities of my environment
• Depend on you
• And your characterization of the interactive
  potentialities of your environment
• But those depend on me, and my characterization
  of your interactive potentialities

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Situation Conventions

• Coordination problem Shelling
• A solution, a fixed point in mutual
  characterizations of the situation
• Is a convention the (Lewis) sense of a solution
  to a coordination problem
• It is a convention about how to characterize the
  mutual situation

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Institutionalized Conventions

• Conventions about how and when to invoke
  conventions
• Insignia
• Rank
• Situations
• Approaching while driving stay on right side
• Lecture
• Other interactions

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Non-institutionalized

• If there is a productive, combinatoric tool box
  for operating on, transforming, situation
  conventions language
• Then those constitute institutionalized ways of
  interacting with situation conventions
• And results of particular such (language)
  interactions (utterances) may yield particular
  social realities that have never occurred before
  or will ever again

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Ontological Reflexivity

• Conventions about conventions
• E.g., a marriage ceremony held in a play
• There is no top level
• That is why conventions must be a fixed point
  rather than completing the unbounded iterations
  of characterizing each other

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Epistemological Reflexivity

• Conventionalized creation of conditions which
  make conventionalized invocation of some other
  convention appropriate
• E.g., conditions that make it appropriate to call
  a meeting to order
• There is no ground level upon which all other
  conventions can be based
• Therefore all invocations of conventions are at
  base presumptive
• You try something that might work, and see if it
  does
• Maintenance and Repairs of Social Realities

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Differences from Lewis

• Lewis model of conventions is
• External in terms of behavioral regularities
• Only of institutionalized conventions
  regularities require repetition
• At best minimally normative
• Utilities of coordination game
• But normativities of multiple kinds are inherent
  in interactive characterizations of agents
  environment
• E.g., representational truth value

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A Bit About Representation

• Indications of interactive potentialities
• Can be true or false
• Involve implicit dynamic presuppositions about
  the situation
• Those interactive anticipations will hold in some
  situations/environments and not in others
• So indications of potentiality implicitly
  presuppose that appropriate conditions hold
  content

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Folk Psychology

• Restriction to explicit propositional contents
  e.g., Searle, and almost everyone else
• Therefore, in attempting to capture fixed points
• I believe that you believe that I believe that
  you desire etc. etc.
• No one goes through these kinds of iterations,
  and people concerned with social ontology know
  this, but have no choice so long as they are
  constrained within standard folk psychology

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Implicitness

• If there is no explicit level at which there is a
  failure (e.g., negation) of commonality (e.g.,
  con game), then there is implicit convention
• There is no such kind of implicitness in standard
  propositional models of representation

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Language

• Language is a productive tool kit for interacting
  with social realities
• Social realities are constituted in their
  commonalities of further interactive
  potentialities
• A major part of those future potentialities are
  for further language activities
• Therefore, social realities have a largely, but
  not entirely, linguistic ontology

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Social Persons

• If human beings are fundamentally information
  processors
• Then storage of social data and rules does not
  affect the basic nature of the processor
• If human beings are fundamentally agents
• Then coming to be an agent in a particular
  culture and society is to be an agent of a
  different kind than in a different culture and
  society

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Persons II

• Therefore persons emerge developmentally as an
  agent that can participate in and thereby
  co-constitute a culture/society emerge
• The ontology of persons is
• Basically biological
• Massively social
• And, therefore, massively linguistic
• But not totally

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Conclusions

• Social ontology
• Language
• Social Persons
• Constitute a three-faceted co-emergence
• Therefore, for example, culture creates its own
  emergence base via the developmental creation of
  that base