Origins of the concept
The English philosopher George Henry Lewes coined the term in 1875. Earlier, John Stuart Mill (1843) noted that the properties of water cannot be obtained by simply adding the properties of hydrogen and oxygen, and he distinguished "composition of causes," where effects sum, from "heteropathic" laws, where they do not. In the early twentieth century the "British emergentists," including C. D. Broad (1925), argued that life and mind are emergent properties that cannot in principle be explained by physical and chemical laws alone. When quantum mechanics explained chemical bonding, this strong claim lost much of its force for a time.
"More is different" and weak emergence
In "More Is Different" (1972) the physicist Philip Anderson argued that knowing fundamental laws does not let us easily reconstruct the behavior of large systems, and that phenomena such as symmetry breaking require new concepts at each level. Emergence in today's science is mostly this "weak" kind. Mark Bedau (1997) defined it as properties derivable in principle from micro-level rules but knowable in practice only by simulation. Craig Reynolds (1987) reproduced flocking with three rules (stay close, avoid collisions, align with neighbors), and John Holland (1998) placed such phenomena at the heart of complex adaptive systems. Ant-colony trail finding, Schelling's segregation model and market prices under the invisible hand are frequently cited examples.
The strong-emergence debate and current research
The philosopher Jaegwon Kim (1999) was skeptical of strong emergence: if higher-level properties depend on physical ones yet have independent causal powers, the same effect is caused twice, a problem of causal overdetermination. David Chalmers (2006) suggested consciousness may be the only real candidate for strong emergence, underivable even in principle from physical facts. In sociology, Keith Sawyer (2005) treated social structures as emerging from individual interactions, bringing the idea into the debate over structure and agency. Hoel et al. (2013) used information theory to quantify "causal emergence," showing macro-level descriptions can carry more causal information than micro-level ones. Wei et al. (2022) reported that large language models abruptly gain new abilities beyond a certain scale, but later studies argued this may be a mirage created by the choice of metrics, and the debate continues.
FAQ
- Are emergence and reductionism opposites?
- Not necessarily. Weak emergence holds that higher-level properties are derivable in principle from lower levels, so it is compatible with reductionism; only strong emergence claims irreducibility in principle.
- What are classic examples of emergence?
- Flocking birds, ant-colony trail finding, the properties of water, traffic jams, market price formation and consciousness in the brain are frequently cited.
Sources reviewed: 2026-10-26
References
- Lewes, G. H. (1875). Problems of Life and Mind (Vol. 2). London: Trübner.
- Mill, J. S. (1843). A System of Logic. London: John W. Parker.
- Broad, C. D. (1925). The Mind and Its Place in Nature. London: Kegan Paul.
- Anderson, P. W. (1972). More is different. Science, 177(4047), 393–396.
- Schelling, T. C. (1978). Micromotives and Macrobehavior. New York: W. W. Norton.
- Reynolds, C. W. (1987). Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model. Computer Graphics, 21(4), 25–34.
- Holland, J. H. (1998). Emergence: From Chaos to Order. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
- Kim, J. (1999). Making sense of emergence. Philosophical Studies, 95(1–2), 3–36.
- Bedau, M. A. (1997). Weak emergence. Philosophical Perspectives, 11, 375–399.
- Chalmers, D. J. (2006). Strong and weak emergence. In P. Clayton & P. Davies (Eds.), The Re-Emergence of Emergence (pp. 244–254). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Sawyer, R. K. (2005). Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Hoel, E. P., Albantakis, L., & Tononi, G. (2013). Quantifying causal emergence shows that macro can beat micro. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(49), 19790–19795.
- Wei, J., et al. (2022). Emergent abilities of large language models. Transactions on Machine Learning Research.