Beyond Weak and Strong: Emergence as Phase Transition and the Cost of Definitional Failure

Abstract

The concept of emergence is widely invoked across the sciences yet lacks an operational definition. Chalmers’ influential weak/strong dichotomy, which has dominated philosophical discussion for two decades, provides no measurable criterion for identifying emergence, no critical condition for its occurrence, and no falsifiable predictions. This paper argues that the dichotomy’s inadequacy has a structural cause: it was implicitly anchored to the physics of thermodynamic equilibrium—the idealized regime where complete microphysical information is in principle available. The phenomena that motivate interest in emergence—biological, ecological, social, neural—are constitutively far from equilibrium. We document the consequences of exporting this misaligned concept into scientific practice: the unresolved controversy over “emergent abilities” in large language models (Wei et al. 2022 vs. Schaeffer et al. 2023), the use of “emergence” as an explanation-stopper in consciousness research, and the definitional paralysis in the social and complex systems literatures. We then identify three specific gaps in the existing philosophical analysis of phase transitions (Batterman 2002; Butterfield 2011): no replacement for the Chalmers taxonomy has been proposed; the Export Problem’s empirical costs have not been documented; and Kim’s causal exclusion argument has not been engaged through causal eliminativism. We propose an operational redefinition—emergence as the transition of a system’s order parameter from zero to non-zero through spontaneous symmetry breaking—that fills these gaps. The redefinition transforms the unanswerable question “Is this emergent?” into the empirical research program “What is the order parameter, where is the critical point, and what dynamics govern the transition?”