Goldstein, Jeffrey. (1999). "Emergence as a Construct: History and Issues". Emergence, 1(1), 49-72.
“Emergence…refers to the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns, and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems. Emergent phenomena are conceptualized as occurring on the macro level, in contrast to the micro-level components and processes out of which they arise” (49). Goldstein then goes on to identify properties that are common to emergent phenomena: radical novelty, coherence or correlation, global or macro level, dynamical, ostensive (50).
He then distinguishes emergent phenomena from “whole before its parts” and “gestalts”. “Whole before its parts” is a way of describing events that privilege the whole over the parts as contributing most heavily to the explanation. To this he refers back to Aristotle and Zeno’s conversation regarding distance, parts, wholes and infinity. Aristotle claimed that the whole was first a whole, and then its parts. This differs from emergence, which, “is not pre-given by a dynamical construct arising over time” (52). “Gestalt”, or references to whole systems such as natural systems, is seen as also suffering from the same distinction that “whole before its parts” does, in that it privileges a cordoned off “whole” as standing separate. Emergence, on the other hand, refuses such constraints.
Goldstein then distinguishes between proto and neo-emergence to highlight changes in the understanding of the concept of emergence over time. It was initially coined by G.H. Lewes: “…the emergent…cannot be reduced either to their sum or their differences” (53). These “proto-emergent” scientists led vigorous debates that eventually fizzled in the 1930s. Part of the reason for this disappearance was that proto-emergence scientists viewed the cause of emergence as being a black-box.
Neo-emergence is seen by Goldstein to be the modern iteration of the emergence movement. In that, these systems must have at least the following characteristics: nonlinearity, self-organizing, beyond equilibrium, attractors. These qualities have been studied by different schools of thought: Complex Adaptive Systems Theory, Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Theory,
The article then addresses issues surrounding explanation and emergence and wonders about emergence whether, “it is simply an epistemic recognition of the inadequacy of any current theory for deriving macro-level properties from micro-level determinants” (59). Some believe that the theory will eventually be discarded when other theories that more robustly can describe micro leading to macro-level changes arise.
Different forms of emergence are looked at, and the concept of “spontaneous novelty” is brought up in contrast to “radical novelty”. Not all new, unique or different features of a system that arise from micro-level agents can be termed emergent. We have to be, “careful in our recognition of emergent phenomena and continually ask the question of whether the pattern we see is more in our eye than the pattern we are claiming to see” (64).
