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Cited by 339

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 110 of the 110 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Emergence in Sociology: Contemporary Philosophy of Mind and Some Implications for Sociological Theory

Sawyer, R. Keith·2001·American Journal of Sociology

Abstract

Many accounts of the micro‐macro link use the philosophical notion of emergence to argue that collective phenomena are collaboratively created by individuals yet are not reducible to explanation in terms of individuals. However, emergence has also been invoked by methodological individualists; they accept the existence of emergent social properties yet claim that such properties can be reduced to explanations in terms of individuals and their relationships. Thus, contemporary sociological uses of emergence are contradictory and unstable. This article clarifies this situation by developing an account of emergence based in contemporary philosophy of mind. The philosophical account is used to evaluate contradictory sociological theories. Several unresolved issues facing theories of emergence in sociology are identified.

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Metadata

Authors
Sawyer, R. K.
Venue
American Journal of Sociology
Published
2001-11
Volume
107
Issue
3
Pages
551-585
ISSN
  • 0002-9602 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-5390
OpenAlex
W2170166728
Cited by
339
References
110
FWCI
25.84
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Emergence in Sociology: Contemporary Philosophy of Mind and Some Implications for Sociological Theory. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/338780
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Sawyer, R. K. (2001). Emergence in Sociology: Contemporary Philosophy of Mind and Some Implications for Sociological Theory. American Journal of Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1086/338780

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.