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Emergence and Communication in Computational Sociology
Author(s) -
Salgado Mauricio,
Gilbert Nigel
Publication year - 2013
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/jtsb.12004
Subject(s) - epistemology , causation , sociology , ontology , social ontology , individualism , methodological individualism , heuristic , value (mathematics) , computer science , philosophy , political science , law , machine learning
Abstract Computational sociology models social phenomena using the concepts of emergence and downward causation. However, the theoretical status of these concepts is ambiguous; they suppose too much ontology and are invoked by two opposed sociological interpretations of social reality: the individualistic and the holistic. This paper aims to clarify those concepts and argue in favour of their heuristic value for social simulation. It does so by proposing a link between the concept of emergence and L uhmann's theory of communication. For L uhmann, society emerges from the bottom‐up as communication and he describes the process by which society limits the possible selections of individuals as downward causation. It is argued that this theory is well positioned to overcome some epistemological drawbacks in computational sociology.