Abstract
Compositional explanations, where we explain ‘wholes’ using their ‘parts’, are ubiquitous across all levels of the sciences and form the backdrop to the new round of scientific debates over reduction and emergence (Weinberg (1994), Laughlin (2004)). In this paper, I outline reasons why downward causation cannot be the backbone of the new emergentist position in the sciences. More importantly, I highlight how a non-causal, non-compositional relation that I term "machresis" is actually central to the views of scientific emergentists in what I term their ‘Mutualist’ position that takes part and wholes to be interdependent and mutually determinative. Looking more widely, I highlight how appreciating machresis, and the Strong emergence it allows, shows the most common argument for scientific reductionism is invalid and that scientific debates over reduction and emergence are ongoing in a variety of concrete cases of compositional explanation.