ABSTRACT
Emergence is a difficult and sometimes contentious issue. What is at stake? On one side, what is at stake is the success of naturalism, of understanding our world as being constituted of integrated natural phenomena. Many kinds of phenomena have, at various points in history, been considered to be exceptions to a naturalistic framework, and to instead require specific substances to be postulated that interacted with the rest of the world, but had no deeper relationships. That is, they have been thought to require a dualism, or higher multiplicity, of fundamental ontological kinds. Fire, life, magnetism, heat, and so on were all once thought, at least by some, to be due to their own dedicated substances-phlogiston, vital fluid, magnetic fluid, caloric, and so on-but are now understood as emergent phenomena of particular kinds of natural processes. Naturalism is now a basic assumption of the scientific enterprise, though it is much easier to espouse naturalism than it is to develop models that are consistent with naturalism.1 I argue, in fact, that contemporary models of function and
representation fail the standards of naturalism and I offer alternatives that meet those standards.
