 On a second formalist explication, strongly emergent phenomena are those which are both fundamental and dependent, and where the notions of fundamentality (whose converse is the “grounded”) and dependence are each taken to be primitive (Barnes 2012). Such a primitivist account clearly blocks ontological reduction: if some goings-on are fundamentally novel vis-à-vis the goings-on upon which they depend, then the former are clearly not identical to the latter. A potential advantage of the approach is that it might capture the common denominator to all other, more distinctive accounts of strong emergence. A corresponding shortcoming is that its high level of abstraction leaves it without the resources of more specific accounts for addressing the general challenges facing strong emergence noted above (Paolini Paoletti 2018 and Pearson 2018).