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The Sortings of Emergence
The field sorts its own notions with a small set of recurring distinctions. This page presents each as the instrument it is: where it comes from, what it cuts, and the difficulties its own literature has published against it. These are the field’s sortings of emergence; the sortings this bundle itself applies to the definitions — by relation to mechanism, by paradigm case — are separate pages.
Weak against strong
The field’s most-used cut, dividing claims by strength. Its canonical statements do not coincide: Chalmers’s version (2006) draws the line at deducibility-in-principle — weak emergence is unexpected but deducible, strong is not deducible even in principle; Bedau’s (1997) draws it operationally — weak is derivable only by simulation, strong carries irreducible causal powers; Wilson’s (2015) recasts both metaphysically, by whether the emergent’s powers are a proper subset of the base’s or exceed it. The published difficulties come from every side: Humphreys’ handbook chapter notes that the terminology’s use “is not uniform” and confines his own use accordingly; Wilson objects that Bedau’s weak emergence is epistemic rather than metaphysical; Bedau holds that the strong pole is “uncomfortably like magic” and scientifically irrelevant if real. The sorting is universal in use and contested at both poles and the line between them.
Epistemic against ontological
The cut most disputes trace to: is emergence a fact about our knowledge — unpredictability, non-derivability, surprise — or about the world — novel properties or powers? Its influential systematic statement is Silberstein and McGeever’s (1999); its ancestry runs to Hempel and Oppenheim (1948), who analysed emergence as relative to a theory — for them not an ontological trait of phenomena but an indication of the scope of knowledge at a given time. The published difficulties: the two readings are frequently run together in practice (the complaint appears in most of the overviews); the ontological side’s criteria are pressed by their critics — Wilson’s powers framework is challenged from the categoricalist side — Armstrong’s, for which properties are not constituted by their powers — on whether powers-talk is itself neutral — while the epistemic side is pressed as too weak to ground any claim about reality; and several of the field’s entries decline the cut outright — contextual, asymptotic, and intrinsic emergence each define relations that sit on neither side cleanly.
Synchronic against diachronic
The temporal cut: the emergent as co-present with its base — mind on brain, Broad’s home case — against the emergent as arising over time — origin of life, development, evolution. Stephan’s graded taxonomy made the distinction load-bearing; Guay and Sartenaer built transformational emergence expressly to capture the diachronic, weakly ontological case. The published difficulty is an imbalance the field’s own surveyors state: Humphreys observes that the philosophical literature on emergence has “a pronounced lean” away from diachronic emergence, while the sciences’ cases are predominantly diachronic — so the sorting also marks the line along which the two research communities pass each other. And single phenomena appear under both headings in different literatures — life is treated synchronically in the supervenience debates and diachronically in the origins literature.
The operative criterion
The cut by what does the defining work: failure of prediction (the emergent could not have been forecast), failure of derivation (it cannot be deduced), or novel causal powers (it does something its base does not). The third is where downward causation lives — the field’s most contested notion, and the one this sorting carries: Sperry’s emergent interactionism asserts it, O’Connor’s emergents have it by definition, Bedau deflates it (the macro constrains as a traffic jam constrains its cars — nothing over aggregate micro-causation), Ellis’s five classes attempt to make it precise mechanism by mechanism, and Kim’s exclusion argument is built against it — the dilemma that a downward cause is either redundant with the micro-history or a violation of physical closure. The published difficulties are the richest of any sorting: the exclusion exchange, the deflationary replies, and the standing question whether prediction-failure and derivation-failure mark the same thing (a system can be unpredictable without acquiring underivable features, and the two criteria classify some cases differently).
Humphreys’ four modifiers
Humphreys’ handbook chapter sorts the senses of “emergence” into ontological (a feature of the world independent of any epistemic state), epistemological (a limitation of knowledge, representation, or computation), inferential (full knowledge of the base domain does not allow prediction of the emergent), and conceptual (effective representation requires reconceptualisation) — noting that the categories are not mutually exclusive and that discussions “would be less confusing if these modifiers were regularly used.” The proposal is itself an instrument for repairing the second sorting’s difficulties, offered from inside the field.
What emerges
The least-stated sorting: the category of the emergent. Properties are the default (the powers and supervenience literatures); Humphreys’ fusion account makes the emergent an entity, constituents fusing into a new whole; the British tradition’s trans-ordinal laws make it a law; the complexity sciences’ emergents are patterns and behaviour; the machine-learning dispute concerns abilities; Durkheim’s social facts are institutions and facts. The sorting is rarely applied explicitly: accounts of “emergence” defined over different categories are not automatically accounts of the same thing.
See also: Emergence (the subject landing) · The types of emergence · Emergence — relation with mechanism · The overviews