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Emergence is central to critical realism, but there has been little attempt to develop a systematic account of this concept within the tradition. Two notable exceptions are seen in the work of Dave Elder‐Vass and Tony Lawson. However, both face problems in responding to reductionist claims and accounting for downward causation. This paper proposes contextual emergence as a robust alternative that overcomes these issues and provides a better justification for critical realism's stratified worldview. Contextual emergence explains that while properties at a lower 'level' offer necessary conditions, for emergence to obtain, there must also be contingent conditions at a higher 'level'. This approach maintains many of critical realism's intuitions about emergence, providing a robust account of ontological stratification and downward causation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the social sciences there is a long standing debate over the primacy of structure or agency in shaping human behavior. Structurationists like Giddens think of individuals' agency and collective features as two sides of the same coin while emergentists including Archer and Elder‐Vass claim that structurationists are blurring an important ontological distinction——they argue for effective social analysis, we should think of structures and individuals as different things because emergence happens when the properties of the collective are not reducible to the properties of the parts that constitute them. This paper contributes to the agency‐structure debate by showing how production and reproduction of emergent properties of social groups sharing same normative commitments (norm circles) can be empirically studied using two behavioral game theory experiments, adding a previously neglected insight that strategic uncertainty can lead to coordination failures of individual behaviors within norm circles, manifested as unintended outcomes of interdependent actions that are difficult to predict. Here the synchronic relation between the unpredictable collective outcomes of each game round and agential reactions of the participants to them defines emergence——the previous outcomes are diachronic inputs but they appear in the new outcome only through their effects on the individual decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper is a response to the new book by Alexander Wendt (2015) entitled Quantum Mind. The paper commends Wendt on the book's contribution to our understanding, particularly of quantum mechanics, panpsychism, and externalism in the philosophy of mind. At the same time, it takes issue with Wendt's overall thesis, particularly as it relates to materialism, emergentism, and social structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Searle has mistakenly claimed that emergence is the central concept in the account of social ontology defended by Tony Lawson, the central figure in the project now regularly referred to as Cambridge Social Ontology. This is not the case. Rather, if any concept can be considered central for Lawson, it is organisation. In this paper, I explain how Searle could misunderstand Lawson and, in doing so, I bring out the importance of organisation for understanding how phenomena, both social and non‐social, are constituted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses conceptual resources drawn from psychosocial process thinking (Brown & Reavey, 2015; Brown & Stenner, 2009; Stenner, 2017) and from G.H. Mead in particular, to contribute to an emerging body of work on the experiences of adult women with ADHD (Horton‐Salway & Davies, 2018; Quinn & Madhoo, 2014; Singh, 2002; Waite & Ivey, 2009). It has a particular focus on how ADHD features in the construction of women's identities and life‐stories and it draws upon findings from a qualitative investigation of adult women diagnosed or self‐diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). A theoretically informed 'thematic decomposition' of 16 depth interviews reveals how complex processes of identity transformation are mediated by the social category of ADHD. Through this process, troubled pasts are reconstructed from the perspective of an 'emergent' identity that offers participants the potential for a more enabling and positive future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The antecedents and outcomes of individual‐level flow are well documented in a large body of literature. However, flow does not only occur in isolation ‐ quite to the contrary, recent evidence suggests that social interaction can facilitate the experience of flow. Therefore, we propose a taxonomy, which distinguishes five different flow states according to two global factors: interactional synchrony and self‐other overlap. Solitary flow bears all characteristics developed by Csikszentmihalyi. Co‐active flow is facilitated or hampered by the presence of other people. Private interactive flow emerges on the grounds of a minimal unidirectional interaction with more passive others; only the active subject is in flow. In shared interactive flow, a fully synchronized activity between group members takes place and all group members are in flow. In group flow, all members reach a level of complete self‐other overlap with the group, which leads to a collective experience of flow on the group‐level. In addition to differences and commonalities of the different types of flow, suggestions for how to induce and study social flow are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author responds to an article by philosopher John Searle on his conception of social ontology. He discusses conditions of adequacy of a theory of social ontology and the defining feature of social reality. He examines the explanatory relevance, and use made, of the concept of emergence and social entities. The author also reflects on questions of ontological and causal irreducibility.