Although the interest about emergence has grown during the last years, there does not seem to be consensus on whether it is a non-trivial, interesting notion and whether the concept of reduction is relevant to its characterization. Another key issue is whether emergence should be understood as an epistemic notion or if there is a plausible ontological concept of emergence. The aim of this work is to propose an epistemic notion of contextual emergence on the basis of which one may tackle those issues.