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Emergence — Relation with Mechanism

The types of emergence can be sorted by properties that are checkable against each definition’s own text: whether the definition states a mechanism for the emergent, classifies without one, or holds the emergent’s underivability as ultimate; the language context the definition is stated in; the manner in which it is given — formally within a formalism, operationally as a testable criterion, criterially as conditions in a discipline’s vocabulary, or informally as a cluster description; and which of its terms it takes as primitive. This page tabulates those properties and shows how they align.

Definitions that state a mechanism

These say how the emergent comes about, and the mechanisms recur across entries: symmetry breaking (Anderson); coarse-graining, limits and the renormalisation group (asymptotic emergence, causal emergence, the multiscale variety); self-organisation and dissipative dynamics (Deacon’s morphodynamic order, intrinsic emergence, the emergence/self-organisation pairing); selection and iteration across generations (the teleodynamic order, spontaneous order); constraint and context (contextual emergence, the top-down-causation classes); fusion of constituents (fusion emergence); and the association of individuals (social emergence — the mechanism supplied in Sawyer’s account; Durkheim’s own statement asserts it by analogy). The mechanisms overlap at their edges — self-organisation and selection combine in Deacon’s ladder; coarse-graining underlies several — and appear here as recurring forms, not exclusive bins.

Representative entries	Anderson; asymptotic; causal; contextual; intrinsic; multiscale; fusion; three orders; social (Sawyer)
Language context	The formalisms of the sciences — condensed matter, applied mathematics, information theory, computational mechanics — and, for fusion and contextual emergence, philosophy worked inside those formalisms
How given	Formal or operational (Anderson’s essay states its mechanism informally; the later renormalisation-group work formalises it)
Terms taken as primitive	Few — the terms are defined within the formalism

Definitions that classify without a mechanism

These give criteria for when something counts as emergent, compatible with any account of how: the powers-based weak/strong pair, the formalisation built for the exclusion debate, the weak/strong cut in its in-principle form, the failure-of-aggregativity conditions, nominal emergence, and the taxonomies (the options grid, the graded taxonomy, the four types). Weak emergence in the simulation sense sits between the first group and this one: its criterion is classificatory, and the incompressible micro-dynamics it points to is itself the how.

Representative entries	Powers-based weak/strong; the exclusion-debate formalisation; in-principle weak/strong; aggregativity; the taxonomies
Language context	Metaphysics’ own vocabulary — levels, powers, supervenience, derivability
How given	Criterial (aggregativity operational)
Terms taken as primitive	“Level,” “power,” “novel,” “in principle”

Definitions on which the underivability is ultimate

The British-emergentist family: emergent evolution’s genuinely new qualities and trans-ordinal laws that are ultimate, both to be accepted with natural piety; strong emergence with fundamental psychophysical laws; non-structural properties that are causally basic. In these definitions the absence of a derivation from the base is not an open task but part of what is being claimed — the connecting laws are held to be fundamental in their own right.

Representative entries	British emergentism; emergent evolution; strong emergence; non-structural properties
Language context	Metaphysics’ own vocabulary, with modal and mind-directed terms
How given	Criterial
Terms taken as primitive	“In principle,” “fundamental,” “brute”

The tables give representative entries; the types page carries the full catalogue.

The alignment is close but not exact, and the exceptions are among the catalogue’s most-used entries: the aggregativity conditions are operational — four testable conditions — from within the second group’s vocabulary, and simulation-sense weak emergence straddles the first two groups. The first group’s language contexts include philosophy: fusion, contextual, and asymptotic emergence are philosophers’ definitions stated inside the sciences’ formalisms — the groups sort by the vocabulary or formalism a definition is stated in, not by the discipline of its author. And the field’s most-used sorting, weak against strong, runs largely within the second and third groups — a division among the classifying and ultimate-underivability definitions — with Bar-Yam’s multiscale account, explicitly a theory of strong emergence, the named exception in the first group, and Fromm’s ladder ending in strong.

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See also: Emergence (the subject landing) · The types of emergence · The overviews