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The Paradigm Cases of Emergence
Every definition in the types catalogue was built on a case — the example its founding text works through and returns to. This page tabulates the pairings, each checkable against the founding paper or book. The field’s own literature names the reason such a table is worth having: Humphreys’ handbook chapter observes that, unlike causation, emergence has no agreed set of core examples against which accounts can be tested, and suggests assembling candidate examples as a useful project.
The definitions and their cases
| Definition | Built on |
|---|---|
| Heteropathic effects (Mill) | Chemical combination — the properties of compounds against those of their elements |
| Emergent vs resultant (Lewes) | Chemical combination, against mechanics’ composable forces |
| Emergent qualities (Alexander) | The ladder space-time → matter → life → mind → deity — deity his own next emergent, and the book’s title — with mind the working case |
| Emergent evolution (Morgan) | Life and mind arising in evolutionary sequence |
| British emergentism (Broad) | Chemistry — the properties of compounds as his confident example, carried with its contested reception on his page — with mind the book’s larger business |
| Emergent interactionism (Sperry) | Consciousness and the split-brain results |
| Two senses (Searle) | Liquidity and solidity of water; consciousness as the accepted sense’s case |
| Weak emergence (Bedau) | Conway’s Game of Life and artificial-life simulations |
| Nominal emergence (Bedau) | Macro-properties generally — the contrast class for the other two |
| Weak/strong cut (Chalmers) | Consciousness as the sole serious strong candidate; Game-of-Life-style patterns as the weak examples |
| Weak/strong metaphysical (Wilson) | The book’s worked set: special-science entities, complex systems, artifacts, free agency, consciousness — cases spanning all three of the mechanism page’s groups |
| Formalised for critique (Kim) | Mental causation — the mind-body debate’s standing case |
| Non-structural properties (O’Connor) | Mental properties and agency |
| Failure of aggregativity (Wimsatt) | The philosophy of biology’s cases — organismal traits against aggregable properties like mass |
| Fusion (Humphreys) | Quantum entanglement, with covalent bonding as the chemistry case |
| Transformational (Guay & Sartenaer) | The fractional quantum Hall effect — long treated as a paradigmatic emergence case |
| Contextual (Bishop & Atmanspacher) | Temperature — thermal equilibrium from mechanics — extended to mental states from neurodynamics |
| Causal emergence (Hoel) | Simple causal-model systems (boolean networks), motivated by neuroscience |
| Asymptotic (Batterman) | Critical phenomena and the rainbow — the singular-limit cases |
| Level-autonomy (Anderson) | The ammonia-molecule inversion — the essay’s own worked example — then broken symmetry at scale: antiferromagnets, superconductivity |
| Protectorates (Laughlin & Pines) | The quantum Hall effect and superconductivity |
| Complexity working definition (Goldstein) | The complexity standards — Bénard cells, the Game of Life |
| Intrinsic (Crutchfield) | Cellular automata and dynamical systems read through ε-machines |
| Multiscale variety (Bar-Yam) | The parity-bit string — a constraint visible only at whole-system scale |
| Three orders (Deacon) | Snowflakes and Bénard cells for the middle order; life and mind for the third |
| Top-down classes (Ellis) | The digital computer as the exemplar, with biological cases alongside |
| Emergence vs self-organisation (De Wolf & Holvoet) | Multi-agent engineering cases — traffic, swarms |
| Social emergence (Durkheim; Sawyer) | Suicide rates and religion; improvised conversation (Sawyer) |
| Spontaneous order (Hayek) | Market prices |
| Emergent abilities (Wei et al.) | Benchmark tasks — multi-digit arithmetic, word unscrambling — across model scales |
| The taxonomies (Van Gulick; Stephan; Fromm) | Built on the literature itself rather than a single case — instruments for sorting the others |
What the pairing shows
Chemistry founded the tradition — Mill, Lewes and Broad all built on chemical combination — and chemistry is also where the tradition’s central reversal happened, which is part of why the case recurs in every later history. Consciousness anchors the definitions on which underivability is ultimate: Sperry, Chalmers, O’Connor and the mind-directed side of Kim’s target all build on the mental case, and it is the one founding case that has not migrated between groups. And the definitions with formal or operational statements were built on cases that can be run or measured — simulations, spin systems, benchmark curves, model networks — where the definition’s precision and its case’s tractability arrive together.
See also: Emergence (the subject landing) · The types of emergence · Emergence — relation with mechanism