Emergence is one of the most fascinating and challenging aspects of complex systems. In this talk I’ll introduce a pluralistic stance towards emergence that embraces multiple views, keeping a focus on methods to establish falsifiable hypotheses and procedures to verify them. This stance will be illustrated by exploring two distinct but complementary operationalisations of emergence: (i) self-contained levels of description and (ii) synergistic interactions across levels. The talk will review these formalisms alongside applications to neuroscience and AI, comparing their relative strengths and weaknesses.