Contextual Emergence in Decompositional Dual-Aspect Monism

The concept of contextual emergence has been proposed as a non-reductive, yet well-de_ned relation between di_erent domains of description. It yields a formally sound procedure to translate between descriptive domains in an overall consistent fashion, which has been successfully applied in numerous examples. In this article I want to explore its significance for a particular perspective in the metaphysics of consciousness that has recently attracted increasing attention as an alternative to standard physicalist accounts: dualaspect monism or, to be more specific, its decompositional variants. In general, dual-aspect monism addresses the mental and the physical as epistemic aspects of one underlying reality that itself contains no mind-matter split. Contextual emergence can here be discussed in two di_erent ways: (1) as a relation between states in the mental and physical domains, and (ii) as a relation between the mental and the physical on one side and their psychophysically neutral base on the other.