In Chapter 3, I traced the long history of emergentist thought in the social sciences, from its nineteenth-century origins to the mid-twentieth century. This history demonstrates that emergentism has always been an influential element in the foundational theories of both psychology and sociology. In this chapter, I bring the story up to the present by reviewing emergentist elements in contemporary psychology. In the bulk of the chapter, I identify five unresolved issues that emergentism has encountered throughout its history, and I suggest several implications for contemporary schools of psychology. Most of these issues are essentially sociological, and this discussion leads into the more sociological material of Chapters 5 through 7.

Emergence is a central concept in two contemporary psychological paradigms – socioculturalism and connectionist cognitive science – and both of them have important implications for sociology. The connectionist and distributed models of contemporary cognitive science hypothesize a “society of mind” (Minsky 1985; Rumelhart and McClelland 1986); that is, they consider the mind to be a society of independent, autonomous entities, with mental states emerging from their interaction.