ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses certain representative accounts of metaphysical emergence falling into some broad categories, assessing their prospects for satisfying the earlier criteria; the ensuing dialectic will have a bit of the Goldilocks fable about it. The characteristic combination of dependence and autonomy serves to motivate the notion of metaphysical emergence as important to understanding natural reality. The notion of synchronic dependence at issue in metaphysical emergence is ‘broad’, in allowing for temporally extended dependence of emergent phenomena on base phenomena. Though abstractionist accounts of emergence appeal to posit that are properly metaphysical, the overly abstract characterizations of these posit renders them too devoid of content to do any useful theoretical work. Scientific descriptions of case studies of emergence often emphasize the ‘in-principle’ unpredictability of the phenomena at issue, and an appeal to unpredictability has been a frequent theme in accounts of emergence, including those aiming to characterize emergence as a metaphysical phenomenon.
