decomposition, and 3) the unexpectedness and/or unpredictability of emergent features.
To understand better the implications of emergence in engineering practice, he looks at
whether, and in what respect, the functions of simple, stand-alone technical artifacts, such
as everyday household appliances, can be regarded as emergent. He argues that the occur-
rence of epistemically emergent features in technical artifacts is not necessarily a threat
to the control paradigm in engineering, since these features may be predictable and con-
trollable on the basis of inductively established regularities. Emergence, though not the
control paradigm, is also a central topic in the philosophy of biology, as is initially pointed
out by Kroes. It is thus important to see that his results on what kinds of emergence are
relevant in the fi eld of technology fi t in nicely with results obtained with respect to bio-
logical systems (Boogerd et al. 2005).
References
Boogerd, F. C., Bruggeman, F. J., Richardson, R. C., Stephan, A., and Westerhoff, H. V. (2005). Emergence and
its place in nature: A case study of biochemical networks. Synthese, 145: 131–164.
Richerson, P., and Boyd, R. (2005). Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
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