Emergence, group judgment and the discursive dilemma

In this paper, I argue that the account of emergence advanced by Broad (The mind and its place in nature, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, (1925) is both defensible (in the sense that it provides a coherent and non-mysterious view that does what we want a theory of emergence to do) and applicable to some examples of group-level (or social) phenomena. Specifically, Broad’s account enables the formulation of a non-reductive physicalism (in philosophy of mind) or of a non-reductive individualism (in philosophy of social science), and correctly describes the case of group-judgment under the conditions of the discursive dilemma. Furthermore, this analysis shows that emergent phenomena need not be characterised using the resources of complexity theory.