Participación invitada: Ontological plurality, reduction, and two forms of emergence

OLIMPIA LOMBARDI

Santiago de Chile

Workshop; Reduction in Physics and Biology, International Workshop in Philosophy of Physics and Philosophy of Biology; 2016

Instituto de Filosofía y Ciencias de la Complejidad (IFICC)

I will begin by considering the problem of the relationship between physics and chemistry from the anti-reductionist perspective given by a Kantian rooted ontological pluralism. From this perspective I will analyze a neo-reductionist approach and its treatment of bridge laws, in particular those that do not express identity relations. This task will lead me to consider emergence and its essential features. On this basis, I will distinguish between intratheory emergence, in which the emergent and the base properties correspond to states defined in the context of the same theory, and intertheory emergence, which is a relationship between properties theoretically and empirically characterized in the context of different theories. I will accept the fist form of emergence but will argue against the second one from an ontological pluralist perspective.