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Title
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Temporalizing ontology: a case for pragmatic emergence
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Author
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Abstract
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| Despite an attempt to break with the hierarchical picture in traditional emergentist thought, non-standard accounts of emergence are often still committed to a premisethat ontology is prior to epistemology. This paper aims to topple this last remnant ofthe traditional hierarchy by explicating a pragmatic view of emergence based on John Dewey’s work. Dewey argued that the traditional notion of ontology is premised on aview of existence as complete. Through a discussion of Dewey’s work it is argued that this premise results in a process of reification that unduly excludes from ontology many precarious and indeterminate aspects involved both in everyday life and in philosophic and scientific inquiry. Building on a recent explication of transformational emergence the paper proposes a diachronic and non-hierarchical account of emergence, called pragmatic emergence. According to that account the relation between ontology and epistemology is a temporally reciprocal one. This means that ontological and epistemological features co-determine each other over time. Determinacy and continuity become historical features of a multitude of unfinished processes that we view from within. |
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Language
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English
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Source (journal)
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Synthese : an international journal for epistemology, methodology and philosophy of science. - Dordrecht, 1936, currens
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Synthese (Dordrecht. Print)
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Publication
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Dordrecht
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Springer
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2020
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ISSN
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0039-7857
[print]
1573-0964
[online]
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DOI
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10.1007/S11229-020-02615-1
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Volume/pages
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p. 1-14
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ISI
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000519495500003
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Full text (Publisher's DOI)
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Full text (open access)
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