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Emergence Under Other Names

The word’s definitional condition is documented on the overviews page; alongside the literature that runs on the word stands a larger body of work covering the same territory — levels with their own laws, order from interaction, wholes constraining parts, novelty from recombination — in vocabularies of its own, in which the word is not load-bearing even where it appears. This page maps those vocabularies and where each lives on this site.

Physics: renormalisation, universality, effective theories

Condensed-matter physics carries level-autonomy in working terms of its own. Universality: identical critical behaviour across different micro-physics, with the renormalisation group as the exhibited mechanism — the vocabulary in which macro-independence is a theorem rather than a thesis. Effective theories: descriptions valid at a scale, with the finer scale’s details systematically absorbed. The word appears in this literature — Anderson’s essay is the anthology’s emblem, and Laughlin and Pines named their protectorates emergent — but the technique does its work without it: the renormalisation calculation, not the word, is what carries the claim. The territory lives at phase transitions.

Complexity science: self-organisation, pattern formation, collective behaviour

The complexity sciences run a working vocabulary in which order arising from local interaction has its own names: self-organisation (order without external control), pattern formation, collective behaviour, criticality. The distinction between these terms and “emergence” is itself maintained in the field’s methodological literature — self-organisation naming the process, emergence the product-to-base relation — and much of the field’s working vocabulary is the former. The territory lives at complex adaptive systems, with Bak’s self-organised criticality and Prigogine’s dissipative structures as its named strands.

Biology: autopoiesis, organisation, the organism

Biology’s account of wholes that are more than assemblies was built in deliberately new vocabulary: autopoiesis — the self-producing organisation that makes a living system a unity — coined by Maturana and Varela as its own conceptual apparatus; the organisation and closure vocabulary that descends from it; and the older organism tradition, for which the whole is prior to the analysis of its parts. The territory lives at autopoiesis and the philosophy of organism, with basal cognition carrying the empirical programme in which cell collectives hold and navigate targets no single cell contains.

Construction: assembly history

Assembly theory measures complexity by construction history — the depth of what had to exist first — and locates novelty in recombination and selection: a quantitative vocabulary for the arising of the new that runs on assembly index and selection rather than on the word. The territory lives at assembly theory, with Walker and Cronin its principals.

The social: sui generis, social construction, spontaneous order

The social sciences carried the territory before the word had its modern currency and largely without it. Durkheim’s sui generis — social facts exterior to and constraining every individual — is its own coinage, from 1895. Social construction names the process by which institutions become objective realities to their members — the territory of the social construction of reality. And Hayek’s spontaneous order — order from human action but not human design — was built as a named alternative to design vocabulary, and does its work without the emergence register.

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