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For Emergence: Refining Archer's Account of Social Structure
Author(s) -
ELDERVASS DAVE
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
journal for the theory of social behaviour
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.615
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1468-5914
pISSN - 0021-8308
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-5914.2007.00325.x
Subject(s) - argument (complex analysis) , structure and agency , epistemology , reductionism , agency (philosophy) , cites , social structure , sociology , causal structure , social theory , positive economics , philosophy , law , political science , politics , economics , biochemistry , chemistry , physics , quantum mechanics , fishery , biology
The question of social structure and its relationship to human agency remains one of the central problems of social theory. One of the most promising attempts to provide a solution has been Margaret Archer's morphogenetic approach, which invokes emergence to justify treating social structure as causally effective. Archer's argument, however, has been criticised by a number of authors who suggest that the examples she cites can be explained in reductionist terms and thus that they fail to sustain her claim for the independent causal effectiveness of social structure. This paper offers an alternative argument to support the emergentist claim for the causal effectiveness of social structure, and shows how this argument refutes a representative critique of social emergence.