Yes, this concept of levels of organization or integration really gets at emergence. For example, biology cannot be _reduced_ to chemistry. There are emergent or qualitatively new aspects to biology that cannot be explained by chemistry principles alone.
Emergent levels of integration is one of the main illustrations of the dialectics of natural science
I very much agree with your points above.
Or anthropology cannot be reduced to individual human psychology in the way that theromodynamics is reduced to mechanics by Boyle ( or is it Charles ?) I wrote a paper on this as a senior in college. ( By the way, at that time I had the wrong position; my professor disagreed).
I have provocative comment on a piece of the above, on the relationship of anthropology to human psychology that is off the point you are making but calls into practice the notion of integrative or emergent levels. My thinking is that human psychology would be a "higher" or to grasp for a term "later-generated" level than phylogeny, anthropology or sociology, which I think can be seen as "emergent levels" in that order. Vygotsky also talks about something like an emergentist concept when he talks about the "genetic-historic" method, which means looking at both the origin and the development of things. Focusing on the "genetic" part, we can say, I believe, that human biology "preceded" human history, which preceded particular social systems, which preceded political-legal systems, and then comes culture, and finally psychology - painting with a broad brush, of course. I make a point of this and call it provocative - not to imply that you disagree with this - but because general bourgeois thinking argues a very different paradigm - biology creates psychology (human nature) which in turn creates history, society, and culture. This little difference in "genetic-historic" order or "order of emergence" if you will creates an enormous difference in method and analysis and world views, donchya think? And herein we see, I think, another powerful use of the concept of emergence as an explanatory principle.
- Steve
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