Journal on Policy and Complex Systems
is that law-like functions at one level can give rise to novel phenomena at higher orders : what is commonly referred to as emergence ( Friesen , 2018a ). Emergence in a critical realist context is “ the relationship between two [ structural levels of reality ] such that one arises diachronically ( or perhaps synchronically ) out of the other but is capable of reacting back on the lower level and is causally irreducible to it ” ( Steinmetz , 1998 , p . 173 ). The implication is that even where we may find law-like behavior by looking at isolated lower order interactions ( e . g ., the conservation of energy in the atomic structure of hydrogen ), the explanation provided by that law does not encompass all aspects of behavior that occurs at higher orders .
Emergence complicates our efforts to sort out direct causal arrows ( Richardson , Snowden , & Allen , 2006 ). Current scholarship reveals an important role for emergence in scientific investigation :
After a long hiatus , emergence is finding new usefulness and recent scholarship suggests that generative atomism is one common philosophical version of emergence and includes : a . Facts about fundamental kinds of entities ; b . Facts about permanent properties of these fundamental entities ; c . Facts about transitory properties the fundamental entities can have ; d . Facts about the laws that govern the distribution of the entities and the nature of their properties . ( paraphrase of longer explanation , Humphreys , 2016 , pp . 11-12 ).
Physical descriptions of parts , wholes , and laws do not mean that social interactions are excluded from the insights of emergence . It is possible to consider that the generative nature of social interactions arises from individual humans as the basic elements and their thought processes as a capability of those elements . The relations among parts , elements , people , natural entities , and everything else around us is deeply complex at a causal level . Critical realism seeks to understand how law-like behavior on the one hand is related to less understood or unexpected causal effects on the other . At the meso level of social structural analyses , such as investigations of social capital at neighborhood levels , these patterns and regularities amid potentially wide variations are a persistent challenge .
4 . Complexity Science
Figure 3
The critical realist framework
suggests what may be known and how it may be known at a general level . Complexity science is directly concerned with the causally difficult phenomena we experience and of
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