A Constraint-Based Framework for Cross-Domain Emergence

Across physical, biological, cognitive, and social systems, researchers repeatedly encounter similar patterns of stability, instability, reorganization, holarchic structure, and information persistence. Within philosophy of science, such cross-domain recurrence is often treated either as superficial analogy or as evidence for overly strong unifying claims, leaving its explanatory status unresolved. This paper argues that the central difficulty lies not in the observation of recurrent emergence-related patterns, but in the absence of a disciplined account of the minimal generative constraints that make persistence, historical continuity, and cumulative organization possible across domains. Rather than treating emergence cycles as governing processes, developmental stages, or universal dynamics, the framework developed here interprets them as phase expressions through which underlying constraint structure becomes empirically legible during periods of instability. The paper introduces a constraint-based framework identifying four minimal viability-level generative constraints: configurational multiplicity, constraint enforcement, information persistence, and irreversibility. These constraints are derived as necessary conditions for persistence and history to be possible at all, and are formalized as the viability-level constraints of an inferred informational grammar termed the Metacode. The framework’s status is explicitly epistemic rather than ontological. To discipline cross-domain comparison, the paper introduces Isomorphic Mapping as a falsifiable methodological approach for evaluating correspondence in constraint structure across systems implemented in different substrates. By foregrounding limits, failure conditions, and explanatory restraint, the framework offers a minimal and testable basis for cross-domain emergence analysis without collapsing domain-specific explanation.