ABSTRACT
The term “emergence” is seldom used by psychologists. An inquiry carried out in Psych-Info (the largest and mostly used databases of scientifi c articles and books about psychological issues), considering works published starting from the fi rst decades of the last century and by using “emergence” and “emergentism” as keywords, produced a short list of titles. If we exclude papers which addressed the topic by assuming a philosophical perspective (e.g., McLaughlin, 1999; Saeger, 2006), only a few papers are relevant and can highlight how emergence was conceived by psychologists or with reference to psychology. Furthermore, in Sawyer (2002), which appears to provide us the most relevant contribution to our subject, since it was aimed at analyzing the presence and infl uence of the concept of “emergence” in scientifi c psychology along its history, we fi nd that few scholars mentioned are psychologists and few theories reported are genuine psychological theories. Most authors considered in the paper are philosophers (Mill, Lewes, Morgan, Bergson) and contemporary philosophers of mind (Davidson, Fodor, Kim), social scientists (Mead, Durkheim, Parsons, Menger, von Hayek), and present-day sociologists. As a third proof of the poverty of the psychological contribution to emergentism, we note that in Clayton’s (2004) book Mind and Emergence-a book in which both the philosophical and the scientifi c approaches are taken into account-psychology is not included in the scientifi c disciplines considered (whereas physics, chemistry, biology, neurosciences, and artifi cial intelligence are considered), and only a couple of psychologists are quoted.
