ABSTRACT
Philosophical and scientifi c writing about the concept of emergence is animated by the widespread though not universal conviction that wherever the natural world manifests patterns of organized behavior whose description seems to require distinctive descriptive and causal/explanatory concepts, there may be found distinctive natural properties and processes-ones that operate independently of more fundamental processes. But the nature of their distinctive character and causal/explanatory autonomy from more basic phenomena is sharply debated. One of the most fundamental divides arises from the following question: do emergent phenomena entail that theories of basic physics must necessarily be ‘incomplete’, insofar as these theories are developed by studying small-scale microscopic systems exclusively when they are not embedded within organized emergent systems, and so not being subjected to the distinctive forces or constraints of such systems? The chapters in this fi rst part address general questions of this sort, and each proposes a different account of how emergence is best understood for reasons of either conceptual coherence or explanatory fruitfulness.
