Home > Positioning > Subjects > Emergence > The types

The Types of Emergence

The word “emergence” names many things. This page catalogues the named types — each with its origin and its definition in a line. The inclusion bar: a type earns an entry for a distinct definition; new labels for existing definitions are folded as aliases.

The catalogue

Type	Origin	Definition in a line
Heteropathic effects	Mill, 1843	Joint effects that are not the sum of the separate effects — chemical against mechanical laws
Emergent (vs resultant)	Lewes, 1875	An effect incommensurable with its components, not traceable as their sum — the coinage
Emergent qualities in a hierarchy	Alexander, 1920	New qualities as levels in a hierarchy of complexity, to be accepted “with natural piety” — the phrase is his
Emergent evolution	Lloyd Morgan, 1923	Genuinely new qualities arising in evolutionary sequence — Alexander’s natural piety adopted as method
British-emergentist emergence	Broad, 1925	Properties of wholes underivable in principle from the components in other combinations; trans-ordinal laws ultimate
Level-autonomy (“More is Different”)	Anderson, 1972	Each level of complexity with its own laws, arising through symmetry breaking — reducible in principle, not reconstructible from the reduction
Emergent interactionism	Sperry, 1960s–80s	Consciousness as an emergent brain property exerting downward causal control
Two senses of “emergent”	Searle, 1992	Features explained by element interactions (accepted) vs features with powers beyond them (rejected)
Non-structural emergent properties	O’Connor, 1994	An emergent as a non-structural property: causally basic, macro-level, with genuine downward efficacy
Failure of aggregativity	Wimsatt, 1986/1997	A system property is emergent to the degree it fails the four aggregativity conditions (intersubstitution, size scaling, decomposition, cooperativity)
Weak emergence	Bedau, 1997	Derivable from the micro-dynamics, but only by simulation — explanatory incompressibility
Nominal emergence	Bedau, 1997/2002	Any macro-property that no micro-constituent can possess — ubiquitous and innocuous
Emergentism formalised for critique	Kim, 1999	The target definition of the exclusion argument: supervenience + irreducibility (non-functionalisability) + downward causation, jointly
Weak emergence (in-principle sense)	Chalmers, 2006	Unexpected given the low-level principles, but deducible in principle
Strong emergence	Chalmers, 2006	Not deducible even in principle; entails new fundamental laws — consciousness the one serious candidate claimed
Weak metaphysical emergence	Wilson, 2015/2021	The dependent feature has a proper subset of the powers of its base — real, and physicalism-compatible
Strong metaphysical emergence	Wilson, 2015/2021	The dependent feature has at least one power its base lacks — physicalism fails if instantiated
Graded taxonomy	Stephan, 1999	Weak, synchronic and diachronic emergence with strong variants — the graded sorting the European literature uses
The options grid	Van Gulick, 2001	Modest-to-radical epistemic and ontological variants sorted into a single grid — the taxonomists’ taxonomy
Fusion emergence	Humphreys, 1997/2016	Base entities fuse, losing their identities in the emergent — against the layered supervenience picture
Transformational emergence	Guay & Sartenaer, 2016	The later system emerges from the earlier by a spatiotemporally continuous, possibly deterministic transformation
Flat emergence	Sartenaer, 2018	Emergence without levels — novelty in a one-level world-history
Contextual emergence	Bishop & Atmanspacher, 2006	The lower level supplies necessary but not sufficient conditions; sufficiency comes from the stability conditions of a context
Causal emergence	Hoel et al., 2013	The coarse-grained description carries higher effective information than the micro — macro beating micro, quantified
Asymptotic emergence	Batterman, 2002	Novel behaviour located in singular limits, explained by asymptotic reasoning — neither reduction nor classical emergence
Protectorate emergence	Laughlin & Pines, 2000	Macro-laws insensitive to, and protected from, micro-detail — the quantum protectorates of “The Theory of Everything”
Intrinsic emergence	Crutchfield, 1994	Pattern formation that increases the system’s own computational capability — not merely in the observer’s eye
Complexity working definition	Goldstein, 1999	Novel, coherent macro-structures, patterns and properties arising dynamically; ostensible
Emergence vs self-organisation	De Wolf & Holvoet, 2004	Emergents: novel coherent macro-phenomena from micro-interaction — distinguished from self-organisation, the ordering process; the two combine
Four types	Fromm, 2005	A cross-disciplinary ladder: intentional/predictable → weak → multiple → strong, built for multi-agent systems
Three orders	Deacon, 2003/2011	Thermodynamic (synchronic) → morphodynamic (self-organising) → teleodynamic (biased across generations: life, mind)
Top-down causation, five classes	Ellis, 2008–12	Five distinct mechanisms of downward influence, from algorithmic control to intelligent causation
Multiscale variety	Bar-Yam, 2004	Macro-properties determined only at system scale through multiscale structure, not from the parts pairwise
Social emergence	Durkheim, 1895; Sawyer, 2005	Social facts sui generis — exterior, constraining, irreducible to members; Sawyer maps the philosophical taxonomy onto the social case
Spontaneous order	Hayek, 1940s–70s	Order resulting from human action but not human design, carrying knowledge no participant holds
Emergent abilities (LLMs)	Wei et al., 2022	Capabilities absent at small scale appearing discontinuously at large scale — contested: Schaeffer et al. (2023) argue the discontinuities are artifacts of discontinuous metrics

Aliases and near-misses

Labels that recur without a distinct definition are folded into the rows above: “novel,” “systemic,” and “holistic” properties (the nominal/weak family); “radical emergence” (the strong family); “supervenient emergence” (the British/Chalmers line); “epistemological” and “diachronic emergence” as bare labels (standing distinctions of the field’s own sortings, instantiated by the rows that take them). One borderline case is noted rather than folded: second-order emergence in social simulation (Gilbert, 2002) — the emergent recognised by the agents themselves and thereby fed back — which adds reflexivity to the definition and may earn a row as the literature settles.

---

See also: Emergence (the subject landing) · Phase transitions · Broad · Kim · Bedau · Wilson · Chalmers · Anderson · Durkheim