Search

This paper replies to Porpora, King, and Varela's responses to my earlier paper “For Emergence”, focussing on the relationship between the concepts of social structure and social relations. It recognises the importance of identifying the mechanisms responsible whenever we make claims for the emergence of causal powers, and discusses the mechanism underlying one case of social structure: normative institutions. It also shows how critical realism reconciles the claims that both social structures and human individuals have emergent causal powers that combine to produce actual social events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lack of clarity about underlying philosophical commitments leads to lack of clarity at other levels of analysis. Here I show that the literature on so-called 'causal mechanisms' is rife with conceptual problems, stemming from insufficient rigor with respect to the metaphysics of causation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]