 The simplest challenge to weak emergence is from parsimony, and it can be pressed from the side of reductionism or anti-realism (e.g., Heil 2003 and Ney 2010) or from the opposing side of strong emergentism (e.g., O’Connor &amp; Churchill 2010a,b). The weak emergentist grants that the ontology and dynamical laws of a completed, true physics metaphysically determine all fundamental physical facts, and that the latter metaphysically determine all non-fundamental facts or associated truths about the world. In that case, why add to the ontology of the world? Why not parsimoniously rest with the lower-level physical ontology, and offer a deflationary account of truths that appear to refer to “higher-level” phenomena? One might, e.g., construe the phenomena as coarse-grained patterns running through the world of fundamental physical phenomena, and regard truths invoking concepts such as cell, metabolism, cat, and desire as referring (perhaps schematically) to distinctive types of arrangements of underlying physical entities and their qualities. This stance can grant that in practice we cannot dispense with special scientific claims. (The associated coarse-grained patterns are in some sense the starting point of empirical inquiry for creatures like us, and even were we to arrive at a true final physical theory, our cognitive limitations would make it impossible for us to track the evolution of the world in terms directly corresponding to such a fine-grained reality.) But (says the critic) such broadly pragmatic considerations should not guide our views concerning the world’s ontology; blocking such deflationary moves requires a stronger form of autonomy than physicalism allows.