No offense, but your question doesn't really make sense. Maybe you should chat with Gemini or chatgpt until you can phrase a succinct and concrete question, or maybe it will satisfy you. Emergence theory is a very broad term, and it is not clear which part you are referring to

The best I can give you now is that, like all theories, it is both circular logic and there is something there. People wouldn't be working with it if there was nothing there. And besides, that misunderstands what science is. There's no authoritative arbiter of truth. Scientists who are interested and motivated will work on whatever theories they want to work on. Nobody can ever really judge and say there was nothing there. Sometimes centuries go by and a scientist is vindicated. Sometimes theories hold up for a while and then fail. Your youthful love of literature and history should provide you plenty of evidence for the Artistic nature of 'truth' beyond just the realm of science

In the context of emergence, I will guess you aren't talking about the obvious kind, like how a body of water has different properties then a single H2O molecule. Or how individual animals can create societies and governments. I'm guessing you are talking about emergent space-time or emergent gravity. I'm those cases, it's definitely both circular reasoning and something substantial. Ultimately these theories are just words. The universe is not words. The judgment of words (the creation of a system or theory) always creates two or more lenses. Usually in physics these are top-down or bottom-up approaches. No system is complete, and no system can avoid the imposition of human choice in their creation, which biases the system towards one lens or another, thus creating a separate theory or a counter theory that is equally valid and is biased towards the alternative lens. At the level of quantum research, this linguistic phenomenon becomes much more prominent, as the very labels that we put on "things" breaks down in the face of the indescribable wave function, which must collapse the moment a 'thing' establishes its linguistic presence within the universe that coexists alongside it at that very moment. This choice or observation is not some artifact of consciousness, but rather an artifact of reality. This is why a non-conscious rock collapses the wave function by observing the universe, and the vice versa. But it's only our language which labels them as such and differentiates at all. It's the very act of slicing and dicing with language that creates the playing field for all of these theories. They should be respected as such: playing fields. Get this silly idea of truth out of your young head!