C. D. Broad (1887–1971)
British philosopher, Knightsbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge. The most important figure of the classical British emergentism of the 1920s and the historical anchor for non-reductive materialism. His masterwork The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925) contains the clearest classical statement of the emergence relation. 1
Key Contribution to Emergence
Broad’s criterion: the characteristic properties of an organized whole could not, even in principle, be deduced from complete knowledge of the properties of its components considered independently of that organization — while at the same time, once the components are arranged in the appropriate relations, the emergent property necessarily occurs.
This is the crucial pairing:
- Dependence — emergent properties depend entirely on lower-level constituents
- Novelty — they are not deducible from the isolated properties of those constituents
Broad was not saying something supernatural enters the system; he was saying the physical arrangement itself gives rise to a new level of natural regularity. This makes him strikingly close to the modern “emergence without magic” position: higher-level phenomena can be wholly physically dependent on lower-level phenomena while possessing their own lawful organization and explanatory vocabulary. 1
Context
- Built on J. S. Mill’s homopathic/heteropathic law distinction
- A contemporary of samuel-alexander, who gave the position its space-time metaphysics
- His “deducibility” criterion anticipates Bedau’s later distinction between derivability-in-principle and the in practice intractability that defines weak emergence
Relationship to This Wiki
- Central historical source for emergence
- The dependence-without-deducibility formula is the historical counterpart of Searle’s biological naturalism claim that consciousness is caused by and realized in brain processes without being reducible to them
- Contrasts with the reductionist target in chinese-room-argument (explaining understanding does not require eliminating the level of the whole)
See Also
- emergence — The concept his work anchors
- samuel-alexander — Fellow classical emergentist
- john-stuart-mill — Predecessor with the homopathic/heteropathic distinction
- jaegwon-kim — Modern critic whose exclusion argument classical emergentism must answer
References
- Broad, C. D. (1925). The Mind and Its Place in Nature. London: Kegan Paul / Routledge. (Archive.org has the full text)
- O’Connor, T. & Wong, H. Y. — “Emergent Properties”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 1
- McHenry, L. B. (2020). C. D. Broad. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.