How superduper does a physicalist supervenience need to be?

Philosophical Quarterly 49 (194):33-52 (1999)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Note: this is the first published presentation and defense of the 'proper subset strategy' for making sense of non-reductive physicalism or the associated notion of realization; this is sometimes, inaccurately, called "Shoemaker's subset strategy"; if people could either call it the 'subset strategy' or better yet, add my name to the mix I would appreciate it. Horgan claims that physicalism requires "superdupervenience" -- supervenience plus robust ontological explanation of the supervenient in terms of the base properties. I argue that Horgan's account fails to rule out physically unacceptable emergence. I rather suggest that this and other unacceptable possibilities may be ruled out by requiring that each individual causal power in the set associated with a given supervenient property be numerically identical with a causal power in the set associated with its base property. I go on to show that a wide variety of physicalist accounts, both reductive and non-reductive, are implicitly or explicitly designed to meet this condition, and so are more similar than they seem. In particular, non-reductive physicalism accounts typically appeal to a relation plausibly ensuring that the powers of a higher-level property are a proper subset of those of its physical base property.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 103,486

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Non-reductive realization and the powers-based subset strategy.Jessica Wilson - 2011 - The Monist (Issue on Powers) 94 (1):121-154.
Causal Powers and the Necessity of Realization.Umut Baysan - 2017 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 25 (4):525-531.
Realization and Causal Powers.Umut Baysan - 2014 - Dissertation, University of Glasgow
Subset Realization and Physical Identification.Kevin Morris - 2011 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 41 (2):317-335.
An Argument for Power Inheritance.Umut Baysan - 2016 - Philosophical Quarterly (263):pqv126.
The Entailment Problem and the Subset Account of Property Realization.Sophie C. Gibb - 2014 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (3):551-566.
Thoughts on Sydney Shoemaker’s Physical Realization.Jaegwon Kim - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 148 (1):101 - 112.
Subset Realization and the Entailment Problem.Jonas F. Christensen - 2022 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 11 (3):165-169.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
469 (#64,352)

6 months
42 (#108,094)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Jessica M. Wilson
University of Toronto at Scarborough

Citations of this work

No Work for a Theory of Grounding.Jessica M. Wilson - 2014 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (5-6):535-579.
Physicalism.Daniel Stoljar - 2015 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings.David John Chalmers (ed.) - 2002 - New York: Oxford University Press USA.
A determinable-based account of metaphysical indeterminacy.Jessica M. Wilson - 2013 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 56 (4):359-385.
Grounding-mechanical explanation.Kelly Trogdon - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (6):1289-1309.

View all 132 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

Principia ethica.George Edward Moore - 1903 - Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications. Edited by Thomas Baldwin.
Word and Object.Willard Van Orman Quine - 1960 - Les Etudes Philosophiques 17 (2):278-279.
Materialism and qualia: The explanatory gap.Joseph Levine - 1983 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (October):354-61.

View all 28 references / Add more references