ABSTRACT
Emergence is a controversial philosophical topic, and the landscape of its applications in philosophy of science is huge. Some scholars suggest that emergence is no more than an epistemo-logical concept, that is, some sort of metaphor useful to grasp macro patterns resulting from micro interactions. The epistemological approach to emergence can be divided mainly into two schools of thought. Within the Irreducible-Pattern approach, emergent properties are features of complex systems governed by laws within some special science. Outside the debate on epistemological emergence, emergence is considered to be some robust ontological property. Spacetime emergence in string theory might be read through some metaphysical explanatory scheme deeper than the traditional causal one, reproducing the latter. The Poincaire’s story about the impossibility to decide by means of empirical data what is the correct geometry of the world tells about an imaginary two-dimensional world equipped with Euclidean geometry.
