Introduction

Physicalist reductionism is the view that the behavior of complex things like us can be fully explained by the behavior of the most elementary things that compose us, like atoms or even quantum fields. Emergentism is the view that as more basic things combine to form new, more complex things, new forms of causality emerge that make higher-level behavior irreducible to the behavior of things of lower level. This introductory chapter explains the thesis of the book: That the question of reductionism versus emergentism has remained confused by a narrow focus on single wholes in relation to their parts when we should be attending instead to the new causal logics that arise among the new, emergent wholes; and second, that the apparent mystery surrounding emergence is an artifact of the covering law model of causal explanation that still dominates both philosophy and science and that, when abandoned in favor of a powers view of causality, the mystery disappears. Emergence instead emerges naturally without mystery, and sociology rather than physics becomes the queen of the sciences.