Holism, Historicism, and Emergence Author(s): Gustav Bergmann Source: Philosophy of Science, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Oct.

, 1944), pp. 209-221 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/184798 . Accessed: 09/09/2013 10:07
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The University of Chicago Press and Philosophy of Science Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Philosophy of Science.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 10:07:11 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

HOLISM, HISTORICISM, AND EMERGENCE

GUSTAV BERGMANN

In a recent article1 P. Henle gave an analysis of the notion of emergence. His inquiry deals with what he calls, quite appropriately, the emergence of characteristics. Such emergence, that is, the emergence of qualities and relations is undoubtedly the primary connotation of the term, and I feel that Henle has been very successful in clarifying it. The purpose of the present paper is to discuss in some detail one special aspect of Henle's analysis. This is done because the precise formulation of this particular aspect sheds light on the notion of elementarism. And the opposite of this notion, holism or organicism, belongs undoubtedly to the variety of fused 'and confused meanings the idea of emergence has come to cover. The first section simply restates, with some modifications and criticism, what I take to be Henle's main points. In this statement as well as in the later sections occasional use has been made of the terminology of logical positivism. There is, however, no intention to tag Henle with this particular label, nor do I believe that my simple considerations depend upon the subtleties of anyepistemological approach. This is natural enough since most of what Henle says, and all I shall say, lies on the level of the philosophy or methodology of science. Accordingly no difficulties should arise and, conversely, no far-reaching conclusions should be drawn from the realistic terminology which also will be occasionally employed. I shall immediately avail myself of the conveniences this latter mode of speech offers in order to point out that I am dealing, as I believe Henle does, not with psychological matters, but rather with emergence in an objective sense. The second section develops that special aspect of emergence with which I propose to deal. The third section offers a string of supplementary critical and historical remarks, particularly on that variant of holism which is known as Gestaltism. The fourth section, finally, applies the method of this paper to a partial analysis of historicism; certain aspects of historicism are shown to be closely related to the emergentist doctrine.
I

One assumption which underlies this discussion and, I believe, also that of Henle, is basic enough to be called metaphysical and deserves mention at the very outset. The thesis is that no two or more undefined, descriptive characteristics are intrinsically related. To give a radical illustration, according to this view it is not even necessary, in a philosophical sense, that everything that has pitch also has loudness. This is of course the traditional empiricist rejection of the synthetic a priori and of intuitive induction. As is also well known this rejection or denial implies that the two empirical laws "cats eat mice" and "oxygen and hydrogen combine to form water" are both inductive predictions and alike in a sense which precludes the second one from referring to any mean"The Status of Emergence," J. of Phil., 1942, 39, 486-493. 209

This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 10:07:11 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

210

GUSTAV BERGMANN

ingful or worth-while instance of emergence. Prediction, finally, in spite of the root of the word, does not necessarily deal with a process or temporal sequence of the events themselves; the process incidentally involved is merely that of inference from a set of particular premisses, P, and, as the case may be, either from a single empirical law, L, or from a system of such, a theory, T. As far as the characteristics themselves are concerned, not their prediction or explanation, emergence then amounts to novelty of characteristics,that is, to first occurrence or, as one should rather say since we are dealing with universals, first exemplification in time. Such emergence, Henle rightly feels, is conceivable, but also in a certain sense trivial. Even so, a few things have to be said. Novelty, if it is to be of any philosophical interest at all, would have to be novelty of an undefined, descriptive characteristic.i Each of the three italicized determinations is essential. First, since our concern is with universals, a new instance of a universal already instanced would not be novel. Henle's example, a new motor car rolling off the assembly line illustrates the point. Assume, second, that neither a certain pitch nor a certain loudness are novel, while both of them have as yet not been instanced by the same particular. The first occurrence of such a particular would then not be novelty proper. Third, it seems to me that one courts confusion if he extends the notion of novelty to nondescriptive relations. Take Henle's imaginary example of a novel asymmetrical relation that is also supposed to be the first "instance" of asymmetry. Since asymmetry is a logical relationship, that is, a relationship which can be defined without the use of any descriptive term, I see no point in speaking of novelty in this case. If, however, the term is to be thus extended, then it ought to be pointed out that one is here faced with two novelties rather than with one. In the example at hand the first novelty is embodied in the instance or simultaneous instances of the descriptive characteristic, the second is this descriptive characteristic itself as an instance of the logical relationship asymmetry. But the second is really a novelty of a different kind and only indirectly related to the temporal sequence.2 A final elucidation may be added for the sake of completeness. If a descriptive characteristic admits of degrees, the first occurrence of an instance which exhibits the characteristic to a novel degree is a special and, as one might say, weak kind of novelty; however, no sharp distinction can be drawn. Novelty of this kind, by the way, will very often be predictable. At the level of defined characteristics science abounds in examples. If novelty was said to be trivial this is true only in the sense that it does not yield to further analysis in itself. That there actually is no novelty proper seems to be a basic factual feature of the world we know. If there were novelty proper or, at least, if there were such novelty in a radical manner, it would entail
2 In the quoted example novelty is actually denied to the logical predicate because it is an analytical consequence of other logical predicates which are not supposed to be novel. The logical or nondescriptive character of asymmetry is immediately appearent from the following definition in which only variables occur:

Asym (f) . = . (x, y) [f(x, y)

f(y, x)].

This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 10:07:11 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

HOLISM,

HISTORICISM,

AND

EMERGENCE

211

changing categories and therefore a changed structure of the Self. Subjectively stated, the situation would not be dissimilar to that of the congenitally blind who gains vision. But to exhaust the full impact of this possibility, the changes would have to be much more radical. All this is by no means trivial, but it has no direct connection with the topic at hand. Novelty of characteristics is not the core meaning of emergence, it is at best only a minor part of it. Therefore, Henle proceeds to formulate what he considers, and again I believe rightly so, the major part of this core. Emergence is defined as unpredictability with reference to a given empirical law, L, or a given theory, T. It follows that every proper novelty is an emergent, while the converse does not necessarily hold true. This emergence is called logical; I should, for obvious reasons, prefer to speak of explanatory emergence. A decisive point is that emergence thus defined has at least the appearance of a relative and subjective notion; also it is really but another name for relative chance. Similarly, absolute explanatory emergence is absolute chance, that is, unpredictability "in principle." If one accepts our basic Humean assumption and also excludes proper novelty, the assertion that there is absolute chance or emergence becomes a very general, negative prediction about science. But there is still (relative, explanatory) emergence, and thus there is also the question of its status, epistemological or metaphysical, as Henle puts it. Let us call one theory inclusive of another if the former explains all the phenomena explainably by the latter. Make, furthermore, the following four assumptions: (1) according to some formal criterion, no matter how complex, a rank can be assigned to every possible theory; (2) two theories of equal rank are either mutually inclusive or overlapping, and conversely; (3) each theory is inclusive of all theories of lower rank or, more accurately, of at least one of each pair of overlapping theories of lower rank which contradict each other; (4) there are at least two actually applied theories of different rank so that the more inclusive one explains "at least as well" all the particulars explained by the less inclusive one of the two. At this point several explanations are in order. The word 'formal' is used in a sense which would make formal a ranking of theories by the highest degree of the algebraic equations which some standardised form of their axioms contains, or by the number of undefined characteristics which occur in them. Of the terms 'theory' and 'phenomena' the first refers for the moment to the linguistic formulation of a theory, irrespective of application, the second to a statement of particular fact; accordingly we can, in (4), speak of particulars and of theories actually applied. Assume now, as one very well might for the purpose of this discussion, that the structure or logic of our language is fixed and nonfactual in the usual sense. With this customary, though very serious, limitation it is probably a meaningful problem of logic whether or not rank orders which fulfill assumptions (1), (2), (3) exist, in the mathematical sense of existence. But it is a problem of such boundless and hopeless generality that Pdo not know whether to call it Herculean or Quixotic. At least as far as a criterion of socalled simplicity is concerned, Henle seems to agree with this appraisal. But

This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 10:07:11 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

'212

GUSTAV BERGMANN

this is only part of the difficulty. Assumption (4) differs from the first three in that it contains an irreducible factual core which shows that the solution of the formal problem just outlined is almost irrelevant to the question at hand. This core is represented by the clause "at least as well" which covers, among other things, goodness of approximation, the feature arbitrarily neglected in (1), (2), (3). For implementation the fourth assumption requires, therefore, another formal and in a certain sense arbitrary criterion, namely, a criterion for the goodness of an approximation. But since goodness of approximation depends upon the stand of the measuring techniques, one could in a world like ours never decide whether (4) is fulfilled. This is as it should be, if one considers emergence not as a category but as some kind of very vague and very general matter of fact. But is there a factual or objective issue of emergence at all? This brings us back to what Henle calls the status of emergence. If and only if the question of the existence of a rank order of the kind indicated could be reasonably asked and answered, would there be a clear-cut problem of (relative, explanatory) emergence. If, in particular, there were such a rank order, this special kind of emergence would also have an objective status or, to express the same thing realistically, there would be emergence in the world. If there were several such rank orders, there could even be several kinds of emergence. This is, I believe, also the case in which Henle would attribute metaphysical status to emergence. I should like to suggest 'ontological', instead of 'metaphysical', as the more specific and more appropriate term. But some might wonder how objective or ontological emergence could be recognized by a criterion which is partly formal, partly arbitrary. To the second objection I should answer that the kind of arbitrariness that here obtains has nothing to do with the pertinent meaning of subjectivity. As far as the formality of the criterion is concerned, it is just because of it that the criterion, if it were otherwise acceptable, would have objective significance. But to argue this point further would lead beyond the limits which have been set for this paper. Finally, if no criterion can be formulated and, probably, also if such a criterion should lead to the decision that there is no emergence in the world, Henle would still grant epistemological status to the notion of emergence. This is to my mind a rather unfortunate use of terms. Whatever could in this case be meant by emergence, such as questions of simplicity, does not belong to epistemology but rather to the psychology and history of science. In other words, it is subjective in the pertinent sense of the term. It is probably obvious by now that such is indeed in my opinion the status of emergence. Let me conclude this restatement by pointing out a virtue Henle's analysis possesses from the viewpoint of the history of ideas. It has been seen that the meaning of emergence which he has isolated from the ambiguous complex covered by the term coincides with the nonstatistical meaning of chance. To have two perfectly good and important meanings of chance and emergence respectively thus neatly identified helps to focus the indeterministic bias which was probably the central motive of the emergentist school. When I speak of determinism and indeterminism in this context, the terms are of course not used with any

This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 10:07:11 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

HOLISM, HISTORICISM, AND EMERGENCE

213

precise meaning; they merely denote one of the main themes in the ideological history of our civilization.
II

Before taking up that special aspect of explanatory emergence with which this section concerns itself, I shall introduce the auxiliary concept of novelty of laws. Let us begin with an illustration and let us, for this purpose, use the mechanics of point-masses (celestial mechanics). It simplifies matters and does not at all affect the relevant features if we work in a frame of absolute space and time. As long as one and only one point-mass (body) moves in such a space, the only empirical law "in existence", or, as we shall rather say, the only observable law is the law of inertia. Only in the case of two bodies will a new law, that of a conic orbit, become observable. Certain more complicated curves or laws will be observed only if three bodies exist simultaneously in the space, and so on. What one obtains by adding body after body is, therefore, a whole series of empirical laws. As one proceeds along this'series one does meet novelty of a certain kind. For there are some places in this series where one encounters for the first time curves (laws) with properties which are not possessed by the orbits of any system with a smaller number of bodies. This is the kind of novelty to which we shall refer as novelty of laws. Since novelty of characteristics has essential reference to the temporal sequence, it must be pointed out that such is not the case with novelty of laws. Rather, novelty of laws is a nontemporal, relative concept; it is novelty with respect to a given set of laws or, more precisely, novelty with respect to certain properties of a given set of laws. It is of course possible and sometimes convenient to think of it in a quasi-temporal manner, as we just did ourselves when we spoke of "adding" body after body. But essentially novelty of laws has as little to do with time as the process of inference with the temporal unfolding of the natural processes which such inference might describe. It is also clarifying to note that many empirical laws, in matter of fact anything a scientist would ordinarily call a law of nature, never exhibit novelty of characteristics. For most empirical laws of our world are rather complex, defined, relational characteristics. Since, as a matter of fact, "time as such" does not occur in these laws, it is meaningful to speak of their first exemplification in time. But it has also been seen that proper novelty of characteristics is restricted to undefined qualities and relations. There is, finally, also an essential feature which novelty of laws does have in common with novelty of characteristics. In spite of the fact that the word 'law' is mentioned, novelty of laws has nothing to do with explanation. At this point it might be well to state, in a preliminary manner, one of the main points of this section: novelty of laws is apt to be mistaken for, or to be considered as a symptom of, explanatory emergence. Two varieties of novelty of laws can be distinguished: novelty through complexity and novelty through initial conditions. Novelty through complexity is best illustrated by the example of the several planetary systems with different numbers of member planets. To formulate this notion abstractly, assume that

This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 10:07:11 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

214

GUSTAV BERGMANN

This is novelty through complexity L2 is considered novel with respect to L. if the natural complexes to which L1 applies are like actual physical parts, in the literal sense of the term, of the natural complexes described by L2. Novelty through initial conditions is best illustrated by a sun and a planet (L1) on the one hand and a sun and a comet (L2) on the other. Novel in L2 would be the nonperiodicity of the hyperbolic or parabolic movement, as the case may be. The two complexes however are alike; what produces the difference is, according to the theory, merely the difference in the initial conditions of the two systems (relative position, relative velocity). The example also shows clearly the peculiar relativity of the novelty of laws. Whether two complexes will be regarded as alike or different depends, at least in part, on whether the respective laws are considered as alike. With respect to the laws, in turn, this is a matter of the theories known and the characteristic properties chosen. In our elementary illustration, for instance, novelty is less likely to be ascribed when ellipse, hyperbola, and parabola are recognized as conics, and still less likely if gravitational theory is known. Generally it can be said that a more classificatory or Aristotelian approach will be inclined to see novelty where the modern, explanatory approach sees continuity and likeness. There can be and there will be, as a rule, novelty of laws without explanatory emergence. Newtonian gravitational theory is indeed the one theory which explains the whole variety of empirical laws (orbits) which occur in any possible system of point-masses. Let us again use this example to formulate in an abstract manner that feature of theories through which such explanatory unity in the face of all kinds of novelty is achieved. Take the attraction formula for two bodies which, as is well known, permits the computation of the orbits for any initial configuration of two bodies. In itself this formula is not sufficient to explain the problem of three bodies. What one does, however, is this. First, the complex of three bodies is, in a certain prescribed manner, decomposed into natural subcomplexes or elements. This is a conceptual decomposition, not a decomposition in re. In our example the elements are the three configurations, of two bodies each, of which the complex "consists". Second, the original attraction formula is applied to each of the elements in isolation. Third, a rule is given to produce the formula or law of the complex by combining, in a prescribed manner, the elementary laws. In the example this is of course the rule of the so-called vector addition of forces. The point is that such a composition rule is not a logical or mathematical affair, but is itself an empirical law, independent of the empirical law or laws that obtain for the one or several kinds of elementary complexes. Strictly speaking one could distinguish still another empirical law, the decomposition rule, which is implicit in the first of the three steps that have just been outlined; but one might just as well consider this law as a part of the composition rule. In summarizing the situation one could say roughly that if one looks at it in a certain way the Newtonian theory consists of two fundamental empirical laws, the law of the elementary complex and the composition rule. This is indeed the structure of every known theory; a theory consists of the law or laws of the elements and of the rule or rules of composition.

This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 10:07:11 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

HOLISM,

HISTORICISM,

AND

EMERGENCE

215

This feature of theories is, I believe, the one precise referent that can be found to the terms elementarism and elementaristic, and in this sense all science is of course as elementaristic or analytic as possible. On the other hand, any breakdown of a theory with composition rules at a certain level of complexity is a case of relative explanatory emergence. Such emergence could also be spoken of as holistic or organismic emergence,since natural complexes that would resist explanation by means of a set of composition rules are obviously what is meant by wholes or organisms. At least this is the only meaning of 'whole' and 'organism' of which I can think and which is not either vague or trivial. For in the sense of functional interdependence every natural complex must be expected to be a whole; closure or causal insulation is a special case. The meaning of 'elementaristi c' which has just been given coincides with one of the precise meanings of the ter m 'mechanistic'. Vitalism, finally, or at least one precise meaning of this ambiguous term, asserts the occurrence of organismic emergence at the level of the biological organism. All this should shed some light on some of the meanings of the vocabulary which is characteristic of the emergentist and holistic literature. Whethe r there actually is organismic emergence and if so, where it occurs, is of course a question for science. That it would not be quite safe to speak of a question of fact has already been shown in the preceding section, for since organismic emergence is a special case of relative explanatory emergence nothing more needs to be said about its objective or, if you please, ontological status. We are now ready to turn to a brief series of historical and critical remarks.
III

Organismic emergence could take several forms, some of which are in a certain sense weaker and "more elementaristic" than the others. Let us again use the astronomical illustration. It is conceivable, though of course extremely unlikely, that Newtonian gravitational theory breaks down as soon as the number of member bodies exceeds a certain critical value. In such a case several things might happen. First, one might be able to generate the law of the critical complexes by applying a different composition rule without changing the law or laws of the elements. Second, one might succeed by changing the elementary law and applying the old combination rule to it. If this, too, fails one can still try to maintain the original elements while modifying both sets of rules. Taking the first of these three possibilities, which is in a way also the most plausible, as representative of all of them, one might refer to these "elementaristic" forms of emergence as emergenceof composition rules. The second variant is the one most readily illustrated by our astronomical example. One merely has to imagine that an inverse-cube instead of an inverse-square law obtains if the number of bodies is larger than a certain critical integer. But if the critical complexes can only be described by an entirely "new" formula, one is, at this stage of knowledge, faced with an instance of full organismic emergence. It may be of some historical interest that the emergence of composition rules has actually been suggested, as a speculative possibility, by Gustav Theodor Fechner in his Atomenlehreas early as 1855. I had no opportunity to see the text itself,

This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 10:07:11 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

216

GUSTAV BERGMANN

but a more accessible report can be found in the little book on Fechner that Wundt published on the occasion of his centenary.3 From Wundt's account it appears that the second variant was the one favored by Fechner. Since Fechner was in many respects a forerunner of modern emergentism, it is perhaps not too surprising that his scientific acuity should have hit upon this expression of his metaphysical faith. But the special meaning of emergence that concerns us can also be found in the writings of a man who was in philosophical lineage and temperament as radically different from Fechner as John Stuart Mill. The locus classicus for Mill is Bk. 3, Ch. 6 of the Logic, "Of the Composition of Causes." The feature to which this chapter heading refers is, roughly speaking, the elementaristic generation of the laws for complexes. Mill believes that "if we happen to know what would be the effect of each cause when acting separately from the other, we are often able to arrive deductively, or a priori, at a correct prediction of what will arise from their conjunct agency." The example cited is "Composition of Forces". Sometimes however, as in the case of hydrogen-oxygen-water, what are taken to be novel characteristics arise and are considered as an indication that composition of causes must fail. Mill's name for the organismic law is heteropathic;physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, are then mentioned as successive levels of emergence in this sense. The fact that chemistry appears in this classification makes it rather strikingly similar to the hierarchy of the sciences developed in Comte's Cours.4 Contemporary empiricists do not generally favor emergentism, so it is at first sight surprising to find such outspoken members of the philosophical left as Comte and Mill in the emergentist camp. Generally speaking, it seems reasonable that the as yet rudimentary state of chemistry, biology, and the behavior sciences was among the causes of this historical phenomenon. But it is enlightening to trace Mill's thought for its own sake instead of merely accounting for it by historical generalities. The important phrase in the quoted passage is, I believe, "deductively, or a priori"; in other words, Mill did not realize that the composition rule is always an empirical law in the same sense in which the laws of the elements are empirical. There is no discrepancy between this interpretation and Mill's philosophy of mathematics according to which arithmetic itself is
3Wilhelm Wundt, Gustav Theodor Fechner, Rede zur Feier seines hundertsten Geburtstages. Leipzig, 1901. 4 Compare Mill's elaborate and sympathetic presentation of Comte's radical emergentism in The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, and the following passage from a letter about Comte he wrote to a French correspondent in 1854: "J'admets en gen6ral la partie a la methode et a la logique de sa doctrine, ou en d'autres mots, tout ce qui se rapporte (Letters, I, p. 182) But see also, concerning Mill's indephilosophie de la science." pendence, the remarks in the Autobiography which, however, do not exclude a direct influence on this particular point. One could also argue this way: The notion of mental chemistry in connection with a certain kind of novelty was introduced by Thomas Brown. One can safely assume that Mill was familiar with the work of Brown when he wrote the Logic; his great interest in psychology and his inclination to find analogical structures throughout the whole system of the sciences did the rest. Each of these two conjectures seems plausible to me and I do not have sufficient philological familiarity with the sources to venture an opinion as to which of them is more likely to be true.

This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 10:07:11 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

HOLISM, HISTORICISM, AND EMERGENCE

217

empirical. The passage simply asserts that the composition rule lies, in a ComteMillean hierarchy of the sciences, on the level of arithmetic and is, therefore, relatively a priori with respect to the sciences proper. Considerations of this kind also help one to appreciate how radically John Stuart Mill deviated from his father's views when he accepted the idea of mental chemistry. By mentioning mental chemistry, by the way, we have touched what I consider a prime source of crucial confusions, in emergentist doctrines and elsewhere. If one cites mental chemistry, or, as we would put what is at least a part of it today, the phenomenological givenness of relations, as an irrefutable instance of emergence, one almost inextricably mixes and confuses three issues. These issues are: first, objective or ontological emergence and its relation to scientific explanation, that is, the matters dealt with in this paper; second, the question of the objectivity of relations, or, in still more traditional language, a part of the problem of the universals; third, the feasibility of analytic introspection and its value as a scientific method. If one keeps these three strands apart one has, I believe, also the schema that is necessary to disentangle the skein of Gestalt. This would require another article. However, I should like to say, somewhat dogmatically, that on the second issue certain predecessors of Gestalt, particularly Meinong who defended the ontological status of relations, thought profoundly and correctly. All this leads far afield; in the next paragraph I shall deal with just one item of the holistic doctrine in its Gestaltist form, namely, Wertheimer's notion of additivity. What Wertheimer and his students so emphatically assert is essentially this. If C1 causes E1 and C2 causes E2, then the simultaneous occurrence of C1and C2 does not as a rule cause the occurrence of E1 and E2. In psychology, where the main interests of these writers lie, C1and C2are stimuli, E1 and E2 are responses, frequently perceptual responses. To give an illustration which is drastic but, I believe, not unfair: a dog which has been appropriately trained runs away from his master when shown a stick and approaches a piece of food held out to him. If both stick and reward are shown to the animal, will it both flee and approach his master? Obviously not, but who ever said it would? Still this seems to be all that the rejection of the so-called bundle hypothesis and the claim that phenomena are superadditive or nonsummative assert. The exaggerated importance the Gestalters attribute to their thesis is at least partly due to the same confusion which misled Mill. First, it is not seen that what they call the "mechanical and-connection" (Und-Verbindung) is simply the simultaneous occurrence of complexes; and that the 'and' is therefore a logical particle, used in the description of natural complexes, not for their explanation. Second, it is not realized that the composition rule is always an empirical law so that there is never any a priori reason to assume that the joint effect will be the logical conjunction of the partial effects. If additivity is the name for such unjustified inference then all empirical laws, whether elementaristic or organismic, are superadditive, and the thesis fights a straw man.5 Sometimes, though, it sounds as
5 Concerning the relation this point has to the theory of measurement, see also G. Bergmann and K. W. Spence, "The Logic of Psychophysical Measurement." Psychol. Rev.,

51, 1944, 1-24.

This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 10:07:11 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

218

GUSTAV BERGMANN

if 'additive' were used in a sense which would make it synonymous with that meaning of 'mechanistic' and 'elementaristic' which has been defined in the preceding section. But even this does not exhaust all the ambiguities; there is a further meaning which complicates the use of the three terms, 'additive', 'elementaristic', and 'mechanistic' ('atomistic' also occurs) in the Gestalt variant of emergentist doctrines. Sometimes these words are used to distinguish a certain kind of systems of interaction, irrespective of whether they are elementaristic or organismic, from so-called fields. But the clarification of the field concept is another job and does not have sufficient bearing on emergentism to be included in this paper. Up to this point I have steered clear of the teleological connotations of emergence and I shall continue to do so in the remainder of this discussion. Just because these connotations, together with the indeterministic ones, lie at the motivational and cultural core of emergentism it pays to explore the other discoverable meanings of the emergentist vocabulary independently. The following remarks, however, will strike close to this sensitive core. Mechanism supposedly means a "meaningless" world; contrariwise, organismic emergence should mean the emergence of meaning or, more precisely, the objective emergence of meaning; it does mean to its adherents that there is meaning in the world, in the same sense in which objective or ontological emergence may be said to be in the world. Let me try to construct the "verbal bridge" which leads to this spurious conclusion. A verbal bridge is of course not a conscious fallacy, constructed under the pressure of a conscious motivation to that purpose. Rather, it is a fallacious argument supplied by an outside critic for a conclusion which, from the viewpoint of this critic, is unwarranted or, as it is now fashionable to say, ideological. Now for the bridge itself: "I watch a dancer and respond appropriately to the gracefulness of her performance; her performance has meaning for me; such response however is not made to this or that of her movements in isolation, it is made to the pattern as a whole; this whole is actually in the world, for there are wholes in the world, not merely elements; thus the meaning the dance has for me has an objective correlate in the world outside of myself; hence there is meaning in the world." The story of the dancer is taken from one of Wertheimer's philosophical papers;6the fallacy is obvious. If an exhaustive analysis of the Gestalt doctrine were intended, another ambiguity would have to be eliminated at this point. The wholes here involved are patterns such as tunes and, therefore, matters of description; they are not, like systems of interaction, matters of explanation.7 It will also be recognized that our bridge rests in part on the assumed objectivity of relations. My belief that this assumption has a sound and important core has been indicated before.
6 "Ueber Gestalttheorie." See also the selection (p. 9) in W. D. Ellis, A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology. 7 K. Grelling and P. Oppenheim refer to a pattern as a W-Gestalt (Wertheimer), to a See "Der Gestaltbegriff system of functional interdependence as a K-Gestalt (Koehler). in Licht der neuen Logik." Erkenntnis, 1938, 7, 211-224.

This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 10:07:11 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

HOLISM, HISTORICISM, AND EMERGENCE

IV

219

The tools which have been prepared in the preceding sections will, in this last one, be brought to bear on historicism. But what follows is not a complete analysis of that complex ideological phenomenon, historicism, just as certain earlier comments do not constitute an exhaustive analysis of Gestalt; in both cases the intention is merely to explore those aspects which are related to emergence. Yet a few remarks as to what I mean by historicism are indispensable. By denotation the term refers to a thought pattern which, I believe, underlies and, from a philosophical viewpoint, unifies some of the most important intellectual movements of the 19th century. In natural science this pattern appears as evolutionary theory; in social and historical thought one can discover it in Hegelianism, Marxism, Spencer's doctrine of progress, and the post-Hegelian German philosophy of history8 to which the term historicism is sometimes more specifically applied. As to connotation, historicism may be defined as the opinion that the statement of a unique temporalsequenceof events,or of a temporal sequenceof unique eventshas a status similar, equal, or even superior to that of an empirical law. This, I believe, is the central thesis of historicism, and accordingly our task is twofold. First, we must examine the thesis in the light of our own Humean assumption; second, we shall have to show how it ties in with emergentist doctrines. All one needs to do in order to dispose of the first point is to remember that neither a unique sequence of events nor a sequence of unique events can be causally understood. This is a corollary to the Humean thesis that no ontological tie connects any two particulars. Still it will pay to examine the contention that historical events are, in matter of fact, unique and are, in matter of fact, understood or, if you please, even causally understood. The alleged uniqueness of historical events is certainly not novelty proper, since what it meant by a historical event is never the first exemplification of an undefined characteristic, but merely the first occurrence of a defined pattern none of whose constituents is novel. And it has already been seen that, even should the pattern occur for the first time, such improper novelty does not preclude explanation by empirical laws without explanatory emergence. This disposes of at least one argument for the thesis of historicism in its negative form, namely, that historical events do, because of their uniqueness, resist scientific explanation "in principle". Besides, the argument from uniqueness really proves too much. The rather amusing point I have in mind is simply that every object or event, including those which are supposedly alone amenable to scientific explanation, is unique in exactly the same sense in which historical events are unique. For language is by its very nature abstractive and never exhausts the "concrete universal". So why not follow a suggestion of Max Weber and, in true Hegelian fashion, extend the argument to the natural sciences?
8 For an English account of these German ideas see M. H. Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge; concerning Hegelianism K. R. Popper, "What is Dialectics?." Mind 49, 1940, 403-426; concerning Darwinism G. Bergmann, "Psychoanalysis and Experimental Psychology." Mind, 52, 1943, 122-140.

This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 10:07:11 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

220

GUSTAV

BERGMANN

Having thus disposed of the sequence of unique events, let us proceed to ask how a unique sequence of events is, in matter of fact, understood. It will be noticed that this time I did not say "causally understood"; that would hardly be fair since according to my premisses causal understanding of a unique series as such, not merely as the outcome of empirical laws under certain initial conditions, is a contradiction in terms. But the kind of understanding which historicism claims as peculiarly characteristic of its method is indeed not causal, but empatheticunderstanding. If this is so, it will be enlightening to show that empathetic understanding is but a crude form of scientific understanding or explanation in terms of empirical laws. First I should like to say that what is usually called empathetic understanding of, let us say, an individual piece of human behavior, is rarely a pure case. In most instances we possess some fragmentary, not very reliable knowledge of regularities which produces in us that feeling of acquaintance which is the psychological criterion of understanding. But let us consider a pure case where somebody understands an individual piece of behavior without any pertinent knowledge whatsoever. I should not deny the possibility of such understanding; I should merely urge that what we actually do in such a case is to ask ourselves more or less consciously how we would behave in the given situation. Behavior like ours is then the kind of behavior we predict, and when our prediction is borne out we feel that we understand. The point, therefore, is that what actually takes place is a very crude form of inductive or scientific reasoning: I would behave in a certain way, therefore you will behave in the same way. Max Weber's "ideal type" is, at its best, an attempt to understand in this manner some kind of average individual; at its worst it attempts to understand the Zeitgeist. Up to this point we have dealt with the alleged uniqueness of events and have found the notion of novelty of characteristics to be most helpful. Accordingly one would almost expect that novelty of laws will play a role as soon as we begin to look for the place of laws in the hunting grounds of historicism. Novelty of laws, it will be remembered, is either novelty through complexity or novelty through initial conditions. But there is, furthermore, a third pseudoform of this kind of novelty which is indeed responsible for much of the confusion within historicism. Let me, therefore, begin by explaining what I mean by novelty of laws through process. The planetary illustration which we have used thus far is a very special case: the temporal process which takes place when the system is left to itself is either (approximately) periodical or, at least, not productive of novelty in the orbits. In general processes are not of this kind. Even with processes whose theory we know, so that explanatory emergence remains excluded, the following thing might happen. Somebody who is ignorant of the theory might fit one set of empirical laws, Si, to certain aspects the process exhibits during a certain time interval, and another set of empirical laws, S2, to the same or related aspects of the process during a second and, let us say, later time interval. Take, as an example in the field of social science, the ideas Frederick Engels presented in The Origin of the Family. According to Engels' notions the family structure is during prehistory determined by biological factors, while economic determiners regulate the same phenomenon and produce a very differ-

This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 10:07:11 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

HOLISM, HISTORICISM, AND EMERGENCE

221

ent kind of regularity after the birth of the state. Or, to take an example from psychology, infants learn by trial and error; later on we learn, at least occasionally, by insight; and some psychologists still believe that there are empirical laws of insight which are not only novel but also explanatory emergents with respect to trial and error learning.9 Generally speaking, it is possible that S2 will show novel features with respect to S1. If one is once in the possession of the theory, then the two sets, Si and S2, will of course be recognized as rather crude and superficial approximations which apply within a certain range of initial conditions.10 The point is that even as long as we are ignorant of the theory, no inference as to its impossibility, or as to the impossibility of a certain kind of theory, can be drawn from the novelty in question; for novelty of laws, it has been seen, has nothing to do with explanatory emergence; and even explanatory emergence is, as far as we shall ever know, only relative and therefore not synonymous with unpredictability "in principle". At this point one can build another neat verbal bridge to show how emergentism and historicism support each other. Here is the bridge: some processes, notably the historical process, produce novelty (of the spurious kind that has just been analyzed); novelty means emergence; emergence means unpredictability; hence the historical process is unpredictable, at least in the sense that it can not be explained by empirical laws according to the scientific method. There is still another variant of the novelty of laws through process. The case we have considered is, schematically speaking, that of a novel orbit which becomes observable during a certain phase of the process. But it can also happen that if a system is left to itself, natural complexes will be formed whose laws exhibit what has been called novelty through complexity. This is quite obviously the case of the philogenetic hierarchy. If this happens then another verbal bridge, quite similar to the one just constructed and with the same conclusion, can be built. There is really not much point to this pseudoform of novelty or to any of its variants; what we are talking about are simply features which can not very well be isolated from each other and which may be exhibited by any process, historical, biological, or otherwise. The terminology of novelty has been used merely to build the bridge between historicism and emergentism. Naturally biological and social processes are so complex that all kinds of novelty arise. To my mind it is only this complexity which lends some specious plausibility to the arguments of historicism and emergentism. I have kept my promise to stay away from the teleological and indeterministic aspects of my topic; yet I hope that I shall be permitted to conclude with two brief remarks along these lines. The unique series of events has a certain affinity to teleological conceptions; the fallacy lies in the finalistic interpretation of a temporal sequence. Historicism's argument against scientific method in the social sciences shows an obvious affinity to indeterminism; the argument does not hold. The State University of Iowa
9 Significantly the Gestalters are the only contemporary psychologists who hold this 10The "principia media" about which K. Mannheim talks so much in Man and Societu in an Age of Reconstructionare just such laws.
view.

This content downloaded from 193.198.209.205 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 10:07:11 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions