Almost-anywhere theories: Reductionism and universality of emergence

Here, we aim to show that reductionism and emergence play a complementary role in understanding natural processes and in the dynamics of science explanation. In particular, we will show that the renormalization group—one of the most refined tools of Theoretical Physics—allows to understand the importance of emergent processes’ role in Nature identifying them as universal organization processes, that is, they are scale independent. We can use the syntaxes of Quantum Field Theory and the processes of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking as a trans-disciplinary theoretical scenario for many other forms of complexity, especially the biological and cognitive ones. 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 15: 11–19, 2010