British emergentists

The trivial chemical example that is usually given in the literature on emergence since the early times of the British emergentists is water being formed from its atomic components. The collective properties of water are not present in hydrogen and oxygen so the properties of water can be viewed as emergent ones. 

This idea is an old one, as it was put forward by the British emergentists such as Mill (1872), Alexander (1920), Broad (1925), and to some extent by Morgan (1923), and has also been discussed in the more recent literature (see, for example, Wimsatt, 1972, and McLaughlin, 1992). In other words, the emergent property of the whole is inexplicable, i.e., non-deducible from the properties of the parts. 

It is, I contend, no coincidence that the last major work in the British Emergentist tradition coincided with the advent of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics and the various scientific advances made possible are arguably what led to British Emergentism s downfall... quantum mechanical... 

Mill doesn t expect chemical laws to be reducible to mechanical laws entirely new set of effects are either added to, or take the place of, those which arise from the separate agency of the same causes . The product of a chemical reaction is in no sense the sum of the effects of the individual reactants, say an acid and a base the joint action of multiple causes acting in the chemical mode is not the sum of effects of the causes had they been acting individually. The properties of the reactants Mill dubbed heteropathic, because they figured in heteropathic laws. It is because of his (brief) remarks on heteropathic laws that Mill is usually considered the first of the British emergentists. 

Like the German Naturphilosophen, the British emergentists reacted against mechanistic philosophies. The view of the latter is characterised by Broad [1925, 76] as ... 

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