An abstract mathematical theory is presented for a common variety of soritical arguments, treated here in terms of responses of a system, say, a biological organism, a gadget, or a set of normative linguistic rules, to stimuli. Any characteristic of the system's responses which supervenes on stimuli is called a stimulus effect upon the system. Classificatory sorites is about the identity of or difference between the effects of stimuli that differ 'only microscopically'. We formulate the classificatory sorites (...) on arguably the highest possible level of generality and show that the 'paradox' is dissolved on grounds unrelated to vague predicates or other linguistic issues traditionally associated with it. If stimulus effects are properly defined (i.e., they are uniquely determined by stimuli), and if the space of the stimuli is endowed with appropriate (not necessarily metric) closeness and connectedness properties, then this space must contain points in every vicinity of which, 'however small', the stimulus effect is not constant. The effects can only be 'tolerant' to very small differences between stimuli if the closeness structure that is used to define very close stimuli does not render the space of stimuli appropriately connected: in this case the 'paradox' cannot be formulated. Nor can it be formulated if the response properties considered are not true effects, i.e., if they do not supervene on stimuli. (shrink)

We develop a mathematical theory for comparative sorites, considered in terms of a system mapping pairs of stimuli into a binary response characteristic whose values supervene on stimulus pairs and are interpretable as the complementary relations 'are the same' and 'are not the same' (overall or in some respect). Comparative sorites is about hypothetical sequences of stimuli in which every two successive elements are mapped into the relation 'are the same', while the pair comprised of the first and (...) the last elements of the sequence is mapped into 'are not the same'. Although soritical sequences of this kind are logically possible, we argue that their existence is grounded in no empirical evidence and show that it is excluded by a certain psychophysical principle proposed for human comparative judgements in a context unrelated to soritical issues. We generalize this principle to encompass all conceivable situations for which comparative sorites can be formulated. (shrink)

It is proposed to conceive of representation as an emergent phenomenon that is supervenient on patterns of activity of coarsely tuned and highly redundant feature detectors. The computational underpinnings of the outlined concept of representation are (1) the properties of collections of overlapping graded receptive fields, as in the biological perceptual systems that exhibit hyperacuity-level performance, and (2) the sufficiency of a set of proximal distances between stimulus representations for the recovery of the corresponding distal contrasts between stimuli, as (...) in multidimensional scaling. The present preliminary study appears to indicate that this concept of representation is computationally viable, and is compatible with psychological and neurobiological data. (shrink)

This paper asks whether we should accept a weakened version of the truthmaker principle: namely, the claim that truth supervenes on being, in which 'being' is understood as whether things are. I consider a number of positive answers to this question, including the following: that the truthmaker principle is a requirement of any plausible explanation of truth; that the principle must be accepted, if we are to do justice to the Wittgensteinian insight that the world is the totality of facts, (...) not of things; and that the correctness of the principle is a necessary condition of a realist metaphysics. In my view, none of these attempts to motivate the truthmaker principle is satisfactory. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss a number of different relationships between two kinds of obligation: those which have individuals as their subject, and those which have groups of individuals as their subject. I use the name collective obligations to refer to obligations of the second sort. I argue that there are collective obligations, in this sense; that such obligations can give rise to and explain obligations which fall on individuals; that because of these facts collective obligations are not simply reducible (...) to individual obligations; and that collective obligations supervene on individual obligations, without being reducible to them. The sort of supervenience I have in mind here is what is sometimes called ‘global supervenience’. In other words, there cannot be two worlds which differ in respect of the collective obligations which exist in them without also differing in respect of the individual obligations which exist in them. (shrink)

In his paper "Supervenience Revisisted", Simon Blackburn redeployed his novel modal argument against moral realism as an argument against Donald Davidson's position of 'anomalous monism' in the philosophy of mind (Blackburn 1985).' I shall assess this redeployment. In the first part of this paper, I shall lay out Blackburn's argument. In the second and longer part I shall examine Davidson's denial of psychophysical laws in the light of this argument.

What is the origin and meaning of our aesthetic sense? Is it genetically encoded or is it culturally inherited? The aim of the essay is to answer to such issues by defining the emergent and meta-functional character of the aesthetic attitude. First, I propose to include the faculty of desire in the free play of the cognitive faculties at the center of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The following step is given by a brief analysis of Darwin’s controversial remarks on the (...) pre-human birth of aesthetics and its relationship with sexual selection (§§ 1-2). The point of discontinuity between a mere animal aesthetic sense and a proto-human one is then found to become indeterminate of desire in the correlative diversification of aesthetic attractors (§§ 3-4). Successively, I deal with the supervenience character of the aesthetic and its anticipatory value. After a short genealogy of the notion of supervenience, I then develop its affinity with that of epigenesis (§§ 5-6). Afterwhich follows a review of two contemporary evolutionary perspectives on aesthetics: T. Deacon’s essay on the “aesthetic faculty” and J. Tooby and L. Cosmides thesis on the evolutionary meaning of the aesthetic-fictional activities (§§ 7-8). Conclusively, the epigenesis of an aesthetic mind is considered as the unity between the breath of aísthesis and the breath of linguistic sign (§§ 9-10). (shrink)

Supervenience is compatible with anomalism: biconditional laws are ruled out by the disjunctive base, and the wideness of mental states rules out one-way psychophysical laws, as there's no single property in the base.

Tn this paper I explore and to an extent defend HS. The main philosophical challenges to HS come from philosophical views that say that nomic concepts-laws, chance, and causation-denote features of the world that fail to supervene on non-nomic features. Lewis rejects these views and has labored mightily to construct HS accounts of nomic concepts. His account of laws is fundamental to his program, since his accounts of the other nomic notions rely on it. Recently, a number of philosophers have (...) criticized Lewis's account, and Humean accounts of laws generally, for delivering, at best, a pale imitation ofthe genuine item. These philosophers think that the notion of law needed by science requires laws-if there are any-to be fundamental features of our world that are completely distinct from and not supervenient on the particular facts that they explain. I side with Lewis against these philosophers. Here I will argue that although Lewis-laws don't fulfill all our philosophical expectations, they do play the roles that science needs laws to play. The metaphysics and epistemology of Humean laws, and more specifically, Lewis-laws, are in much better shape than the metaphysics and epistemology of the main anti-Humean alternatives. However, I do have inisgivings about Lewis's account. Both he and his critics assume that the basic properties are so individuated so that the laws are not metaphysically necessary. If this assumption is rejected, then the question of Humean supervenience lapses. I conclude with a brief discussion of this position. (shrink)

In this paper I pour a little cold water on claims of global supervenience, not by arguing that they are false, and not by arguing that they possess no philosophical utility whatsoever, but by building a case for the following conditional conclusion: if you expect claims of global supervenience to play a certain role in a certain metaphysical project, then you will be disappointed, since they cannot play such a role. The metaphysical project is to give an illuminating (...) and suitably physicalist account of the relations between properties instantiated at different levels of reality. The paper makes a prima facie case for holding that claims of global supervenience can provide no illumination in such an account, a case that emerges when the metaphysics of global supervenience is probed a little more deeply than is customary. (shrink)

The supervenience requirement on physicalism says roughly that if physicalism is true then mental properties supervene on fundamental physical properties. After explaining the basis of the requirement, I defend it against objections presented by Lei Zhong (“Physicalism without supervenience,” Philosophical Studies 178 (5), 2021: 1529–44), Barbara Gail Montero (“Must physicalism imply supervenience of the mental on the physical?” Journal of Philosophy 110, 2013: 93–110), and Montero and Christopher Devlin Brown (“Making room for a this-worldly physicalism,” Topoi 37 (...) (3), 2018: 523–32). (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that while supervenience accounts of mental causation in general have difficulty avoiding epiphenomenalism, the situation is particularly bad in the case of conscious experiences since the function-realizer relation, arguably present in the case of intentional properties, does not obtain, and thus, the metaphysical link between supervenient and subvenient properties is absent. I contend, however, that the identification of experiential types with their neural correlates dispels the spectre epiphenomenalism, squares nicely both with the phenomenology of (...) embodiment and the subjectivity of experience, and does not conflict with the supposed multiple realizability of consciousness. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Consciousness, Supervenience, and Identity: Marras and Kim on the Efficacy of Conscious ExperienceVolume 51, Issue 3LIAM P. DEMPSEY DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000662Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Consciousness, Supervenience, and Identity: Marras and Kim on the Efficacy of Conscious ExperienceVolume 51, Issue 3LIAM P. DEMPSEY DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000662Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Consciousness, Supervenience, and Identity: Marras and Kim on the Efficacy of Conscious ExperienceVolume 51, Issue 3LIAM P. DEMPSEY DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000662Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Statues and lumps of clay are said by some to coincide - to be numerically distinct despite being made up of the same parts. They are said to be numerically distinct because they differ modally. Coincident objects would be non-modally indiscernible, and thus appear to violate the supervenience of modal properties on nonmodal properties. But coincidence and supervenience are in fact consistent if the most fundamental modal features are not properties, but are rather relations that are symmetric as (...) between coincident entities, relations such as "opposite-possibly surviving being squashed". (shrink)

I defend the view that strong psychophysical superveniences is necessary and sufficient to explain the causal efficacy of mental properties. I employ factual and counterfactual conditionals as defeasible criteria of causal efficacy. And I also deal with certain problems arising from disjunctive and conjunctive properties.

RÉSUMÉ: Prenant comme point de départ un article récent de Neil Campbell, j'examine la question de savoir si la survenance psychophysique peut assurer la dépendance psychophysique. Mes thèses principales sont que contrairement à ce que croit Campbell, il n'est pas clair que Kim ait montré de manière convaincante que les formulations de la survenance psychophysique en termes de propriétés soient inadéquates pour expliquer la dépendance psychophysique; la pertinence des difficultés soulevées par Kim tient surtout à la conception que l'on se (...) fait, d'abord de la notion de dépendance qui est en jeu, puis d'autres notions également, comme celle d'explication; pour quelqu'un qui est convaincu par les problèmes de Kim, il n'est pas clair—contrairement à ce que suggère Campbell—que le passage d'une survenance au niveau des propriétés à une survenance au niveau des prédicats, comme celle de Davidson, puisse être d'une quelconque utilité; donc ce qui importe à notre problème n'est pas de savoir si nous avons affaire à une survenance au niveau des propriétés ou à une survenance au niveau des prédicats, mais c'est plutôt la façon dont on conçoit la notion de dépendance dans ce contexte, et d'autres notions telles que celle d'explication. (shrink)

This paper aims to support the claim that analytic metaphysics should be more cautious regarding the constraints that truthmaking considerations impose on metaphysical theories. To this end, I reply to Briggs and Forbes (2017), whoargue that certain truthmaking commitments are incurred by a Humean metaphysics and by the Growing-Block theory. First, I argue that Humean Supervenience does not need to endorse a standard version of truthmaker maximalism. This undermines Briggs and Forbes’s conclusion that Humean Supervenience and the Growing-Block (...) theory are incompatible. Second, I argue that the Growing-Block theory does not commit us to any weaker version of truthmaker maximalism, which also undermines Briggs and Forbes’s conclusion. Finally, I point out other reasons to think that any version of truthmaker maximalism is disputable, undermining a fortiori Briggs and Forbes’s conclusion and supporting the moral that metaphysical theories—or at least Humean Supervenience, the Growing-Block theory, and presentism—are little constrained by truthmaking commitments. (shrink)

The idea of a property's being supervenient on a class of properties is familiar from much philosophical literature. We give this idea a linguistic turn by converting it into the idea of a predicate symbol's being supervenient on a set of predicate symbols relative to a (first order) theory. What this means is that according to the theory, any individuals differing in respect to whether the given predicate applies to them also differ in respect to the application of at least (...) one of the predicates in the set. The latter relationship we show turns out to coincide with something antecedently familiar from work on definability: with what is called the piecewise (or modelwise) definability, in the theory in question, of the given predicate in terms of those in the set. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the connection between the causal exclusion argument and the supervenience argument and, in particular, with two exclusion principles that figure prominently in these arguments. Our aim is, first, to reconstruct the dialectics of the two arguments by formalizing them and by relating them to an anti-physicalist argument by Scott Sturgeon. In a second step, we assess the conclusiveness of the two arguments. We demonstrate that the conclusion of both the causal exclusion argument and the (...) supervenience argument (a negation of the so called ?non-identity premise?) is not tantamount to the claim that all mental events are identical to physical events and that a cause-supervenience exclusion principle is actually required for the validity of the first stage of the supervenience argument. Moreover, we show that this new exclusion principle makes an epiphenomenalism with respect to mental events an impossible position, and that there are good reasons to believe in its falsity, rendering the supervenience argument inconclusive. (shrink)

Reality and Humean Supervenience confronts the reader with central aspects in the philosophy of David Lewis, whose work in ontology, metaphysics, logic, probability, philosophy of mind, and language articulates a unique and systematic foundation for modern physicalism.

Modern philosophers normally either reject the „divine command theory” of ethics and argue that moral duties are independent of any commands, or make it dependent on God's commands but like Robert Adams modify their theory and identify moral duties in terms of the commands of a loving God. Adams regards this theory as metaphysically necessary. That is, if it is true, it is true in all possible worlds. But Swinburne's position is unprecedented insofar as he regards moral truths as analytically (...) necessary. In this paper Swinburne's argument will be discussed and I will reveal some of the difficulties involved in categorising general moral principles as logical truths. (shrink)

Jamie Dreier has argued that the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral requires explanation, and that attempts by the non-naturalist to provide it, or to sidestep the issue, have so far failed. These comments on Dreier first examine the notion of distinctness at work in the idea that non-natural properties are distinct from natural ones, pointing out that distinctness cannot be understood in modal terms if supervenience is to be respected. It then suggests that Dreier’s implicit commitment (...) to the existence of infinite Boolean combinations of properties plays a significant role in the challenge to non-naturalism, and that the non-naturalist has some principled reasons for rejecting it. It also suggests that the real problem for non-naturalists isn’t explaining supervenience, but is rather the well-known problem of explaining our capacity to know anything about non-natural properties. That is, if the latter epistemological problem can be solved, the former metaphysical one might well disappear, at least as a distinctive problem for non-naturalist realists about morality. (shrink)

Supervenience is one of the 'hot discoveries' of analytic philosophy, and this collection of essays on the topic represents an examination of it and its application to major areas of philosophy. The interest in supervenience has much to do with the flexibility of the concept. To say that x supervenes on y indicates a degree of dependence without committing one to the view that x can be reduced to y. Thus supervenience is a relationship that has the (...) potential of replacing the traditional notion of dependence, while performing at least part of the function reductive relationships were supposed to fulfil. Moreover, since it is a topic-neutral concept, supervenience has a wide range of applicability. (shrink)

Habituation, a form of non‐associative learning, isno longer studied exclusively within the fields of psychology and neuroscience. Indeed, the same stimulus–response pattern is observed at the molecular, cellular, and organismal scales and is not dependent upon the presence of neurons. Hence, a more inclusive theory is required to accommodate aneural forms of habituation. Here an abstraction of the habituation process that does not rely upon particular biological pathways or substrates is presented. Instead, five generalizable elements that define the habituation process (...) are operationalized. The formulation can be applied to interrogate systems as they respond to several stimulation paradigms, providing new insights and supporting existing behavioral data. The model can be used to deduce the relative contribution of elements that contribute to the measurable output of the system. The results suggest that habituation serves as a general biological strategy that any system can implement to adaptively respond to harmless, repetitive stimuli. (shrink)

This paper surveys some ways in which the chemical realm can be described and outlined in terms of the concept of supervenience. The particular contours of general chemical theory provide a ready basis for interpretation of determination, covariance, and nonreduction—the characteristic metaphysical facets of the supervenience relation—in mutual terms. Building on this, the extent to which chemically characterized properties and entities can be described in terms of a supervenience-scaffolded structure represents a particularly vivid application that philosophers in (...) general interested in supervenience would do well to attend to. In addition, the model of chemical supervenience given here can be used as a rubric on which to decide on issues already raised by philosophers of chemistry. (shrink)

Unconscious stimuli can influence participants’ motor behavior as well as more complex mental processes. Previous cue-priming experiments demonstrated that masked cues can modulate endogenous shifts of spatial attention as measured by choice reaction time tasks. Here, we applied a signal detection task with masked luminance targets to determine the source and the scope of effects of masked stimuli. Target-detection performance was modulated by prime-cue congruency, indicating that prime-cue congruency modulates signal enhancement at early levels of target processing. These (...) effects, however, were only found when the prime was perceptually similar to the cue indicting that primes influence early target processing in an indirect way by facilitating cue processing. Together with previous research we conclude that masked stimuli can modulate perceptual and post-central levels of processing. Findings mark a new limit of the effects of unconscious stimuli which seem to have a smaller scope than conscious stimuli. (shrink)

Previous studies have highlighted that temporal source memory can be influenced by factors such as the individual’s age and the emotional valence of the event to be remembered. In this study, we investigated how the different points of view (POVs) from which an event is presented could interact with the relationship between age-related differences and emotional valence on temporal source memory. One hundred and forty-one younger adults (aged 18–30) and 90 older adults (aged 65–74) were presented with a series of (...) emotional videos shot from different POVs (first vs. third-person) in three sessions. In the fourth session, participants were asked to indicate in which session (1, 2, or 3) they viewed each video. The results indicated that the first-person POV amplified the effects of the emotional valence on temporal source memory. Only in this experimental condition, older adults “pushed away” negative stimuli by perceiving them as more distant in time, and “kept closer” positive stimuli by perceiving them as more recent. In comparison, younger adults “kept closer” positive stimuli. These findings add to the existing literature on the positivity effect on temporal source memory and highlighted the importance of considering the POV in relation to the emotional valence. (shrink)

Supervenience is mostly conceived of as a purely philosophical concept. Nevertheless, I will argue, it played an important and very fruitful inferential role in classical genetics. Gregor Mendel assumed that phenotypic traits supervene on underlying factors, and this assumption allowed him to successfully predict and explain the phenotypical regularities he had experimentally discovered. Therefore it is interesting to explicate how we reason about supervenience relations. I will tackle the following two questions. Firstly, can a reliable method (a logic) (...) be found for infenfog supervenience claims from data? Secondly, can a reliable method (a logic) be found to empirically test supervenience claims? I will answer these questions within the framework of the adaptive logics programme. (shrink)

Supervenience was first used by Donald Davidson to describe the dependent and independent relationships between the mental and the physical. Jaegwon Kim presented a more precise definition, distinguishing between three types of supervenience: weak, strong and global. Kim further proved that strong and global supervenience are equivalent. However, three years later, Kim argued that strong supervenience is stronger than global supervenience, while weak supervenience and global supervenience are independent of each other. This paper (...) demonstrates that Kim’s conclusion that weak supervenience and global supervenience are independent of each other is wrong. The strength of strong, weak and global supervenience decreases in turn with the latter entailed by the former. This paper also corrects some defects in Kim’s argument and his formulation of strong and weak supervenience, and then further explores the relationship between the three types of supervenience and their philosophical significance. It also classifies other terms of supervenience such as layered supervenience, macro-micro supervenience, and mereological superveniece as relationships of the strong, weak and global. (shrink)

The present study was designed to explore the performance costs of negative emotional stimuli in a vigilance task. Forty participants performed a vigilance task in two conditions: one with task-irrelevant negative-arousing pictures and one with task-irrelevant neutral pictures. In addition to performance, we measured subjective state and frontal cerebral activity with near infrared spectroscopy. Overall performance in the negative picture condition was lower than in the neutral picture condition and the negative picture condition had elevated levels of energetic arousal, (...) tense arousal and task-related thoughts. Moreover, there was a significant relationship between the impact of the negative pictures on tense arousal and task-related thoughts and the impact of the negative pictures on performance . These results provide support for indirect cost models of negative emotional stimuli on target detection performance. (shrink)

Here is a view at least much like Lewis’s “Humean supervenience,” and in any case highly influential—in that some endorse it, and many more worry that it is true. All truths about the world are fixed by the pattern of instantiation, by individual points in space-time, of the “perfectly natural properties” posited by end-of-inquiry physics. In part, this view denies independent variability: the world could not have been different from how it actually is, in the ways depicted by common (...) sense and the special sciences, without differing in the punctiform instantiation of fundamental physical properties. In part, it makes an ontological claim: what it is for one of the objects recognized by common sense or special sciences to be there in the world, bearing the properties attributed by a true description, is “nothing over and above” the obtaining of fundamental physical properties at points, and fundamental physical relations among points. I argue that this view is untenable. I concede that for every true claim in familiar discourses, there is a state of affairs at the level of fundamental microphysics that is the truth-maker—some state of affairs sufficient for truth in the familiar claim. The problem is that the view needs to posit not just truth-makers at the level of microphysics, but truth-conditions—states of affairs the obtaining of which is required for truth in any familiar claim, and the failure of which renders the familiar claim false. That is, the view must posit necessary conditions, at the level of microparticles, for truth in familiar claims. This it cannot plausibly do. (shrink)

Jaegwon Kim contends that global supervenience is consistent with non-materialistic cases. Paull and Sider, Horgan, as well as Kim, attempt to defend it from these charges. It is shown here that their defense is only partially successful. Their defense meets one challenge to global supervenience---the hydrogen-atom case---but fails to meet other, ‘local’, cases. It is suggested that the other challenges can be met if global supervenience is combined with weak supervenience. The combination of global and weak (...) supervenience constitutes a viable picture of psychophysical relations, and is especially attractive to nonreductive materialists who are also anti-individualists. (shrink)

Humean supervenience is the conjunction of three theses: Truth supervenes on being, Anti‐haecceitism, and Spatiotemporalism. The first clause is a core part of Lewis's metaphysics. The second clause is related to Lewis's counterpart theory. The third clause says there are no fundamental relations beyond the spatiotemporal, or fundamental properties of extended objects. Supervenience is classified into strong modal Humean supervenience, local modal Humean supervenience and familiar modal Humean supervenience which states that: for any two "worlds (...) like ours", if the spatiotemporal distribution of fundamental qualities is the same at each world, the contingent facts are also the same. The fact that quantum mechanics raises problems for Humean supervenience does not undercut the philosophical significance of Lewis's defense of Humean supervenience. Humean supervenience says that in a world like ours, the fundamental properties are local qualities: perfectly natural intrinsic properties of points, or of point‐sized occupants of points. (shrink)

“Supervenience”, though a philosophers’ notion, has a venerable history. It was used by Leibniz to say that relations are nothing over and above the intrinsic properties of their relata, by Sidgwick to say that moral characteristics covary with non-moral ones, by Moore to say that the former are grounded in the latter, by Hare to say that they stand in some relation of strict implication and by Davidson to say that “mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, (...) on physical characteristics”. Here is what Robert Stal- naker says about the “intuitive ideas that motivate the attempts to articulate concepts of supervenience”: " To say that the A-properties or facts are supervenient on the B-properties or facts is to say that the A-facts are, in a sense, redundant, since they are already implicitly specified when one has specified all the B-facts. A-facts are not fact ‘over and above’ the B-facts, not something ‘separate’. To state an A-fact, or ascribe an A-property, is to describe the same reality in a different way, at a different level of abstraction, by carving the same world at different joints. " Kim identifies three key features of our concept of supervenience: covariance, depend- ency and nonreducibility. 1 Explanation, sometimes required for reducibility, is absent : supervenience claims state that some patterns of property covariation hold, without explaining why they hold. 2. (shrink)

Global supervenience of beliefs about physical states of affairs on such states has strongly counter-intuitive consequences about what beliefs we can nomologically hold. Tfcs is an argument against a global supervenience of all mental properties on physical 0 n es, and, since that is implied by strong supervenience, also against that as the preferred materialist thesis.

Reality and Humean Supervenience confronts the reader with central aspects in the philosophy of David Lewis, whose work in ontology, metaphysics, logic, probability, philosophy of mind, and language articulates a unique and systematic foundation for modern physicalism.

This paper is an investigation into the nature of physicalism as well as to the possibility of formulating physicalism as a supervenience thesis. First, I review the motivation for finding a supervenience thesis that characterizes physicalism. Second, I briefly survey the types of supervenience theses that have been proposed as necessary (or, in some cases, as necessary and sufficient) for physicalism. Third, I analyze the recent supervenience thesis proposed by Frank Jackson and expounded upon by Gene (...) Witmer. Jackson claims the supervenience thesis is both necessary and sufficient for physicalism; Witmer has proposed a different interpretation of one of the Jackson’s key notions and has suggested an amended supervenience thesis that is, if not sufficient, at least necessary for physicalism. However, I will argue that neither Jackson’s nor Witmer’s supervenience theses as stated are necessary for physicalism. (shrink)