A Unifying Framework for Synchronic and Diachronic Emergence

The traditional discourse on emergent relationship, developed especially in the context of weak and strong emergence, significantly shifted in the direction of making a distinction between synchronic and diachronic emergence. The synchronic concept of emergent entities means that these are irreducible to their parts, e.g. the properties that these entities exhibit are not the properties of the entities’ parts and the relationships in which the entities plays a role are not relationships in which the parts of these entities could be found. On the other hand, the diachronic concept of emergence means that emergent entities appear in time; created as a truly new thing in the world. The diachronic conception emphasizes the emergence of new phenomena over time while the synchronic conception focuses on the coexistence of new "high-level" entities on a lower level. There is a general belief that these two concepts are different and that it is impossible to find a general unifying framework for them. It is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate that both concepts agree rather than diverge, and that creating an acceptable unifying framework for both terms of emergence is already possible.