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Oron Shagrir - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Concepts of Supervenience Revisited
Erkenntnis, 2012Co-Authors: Oron ShagrirAbstract:Over the last 3 decades a vast literature has been dedicated to Supervenience. Much of it has focused on the analysis of different concepts of Supervenience and their philosophical consequences. This paper has two objectives. One is to provide a short, up-do-date, guide to the formal relations between the different concepts of Supervenience. The other is to reassess the extent to which these concepts can establish metaphysical theses, especially about dependence. The conclusion is that strong global Supervenience is the most advantageous notion of Supervenience that we have.
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Supervenience and Anomalism are Compatible
Dialectica, 2011Co-Authors: Oron ShagrirAbstract:I explore a Davidsonian proposal for the reconciliation of two theses. One is the Supervenience of the mental on the physical, the other is the anomalism of the mental. The gist of the proposal is that Supervenience and anomalism are theses about interpretation. Starting with Supervenience, the claim is that it should not be understood in terms of deeper metaphysical relations, but as a constraint on the relations between the applications of physical and mental predicates. Regarding anomalism, the claim is that psychophysical laws have to satisfy certain counterfactual cases, in which an interpreter evaluates her past attributions in the light of new pieces of evidence. The proposed reconciliation is that Supervenience entails that an interpreter will always attribute the same mental predicates to two individuals with the same physical states. However, Supervenience does not imply that an interpreter cannot revise her past attributions to the two individuals.
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Strong Global Supervenience is Valuable
Erkenntnis, 2009Co-Authors: Oron ShagrirAbstract:It is generally assumed that everything that can be said about dependence with the notion of strong global Supervenience can also be said with the notion of strong Supervenience. It is argued here, however, that strong global Supervenience has a metaphysically distinctive role to play. It is shown that when the relevant sets include relations, strong global Supervenience and strong Supervenience are distinct. It is then concluded that there are claims about dependence of relations that can be made with the global notion of strong Supervenience but not with the “local” (individual) one.
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Global Supervenience, Coincident Entities and Anti-Individualism
Philosophical Studies, 2002Co-Authors: Oron ShagrirAbstract:Theodore Sider distinguishes two notions of global Supervenience: strong global Supervenience and weak global Supervenience. He then discusses some applications to general metaphysical questions. Most interestingly, Sider employs the weak notion in order to undermine a familiar argument against coincident distinct entities. In what follows, I reexamine the two notions and distinguish them from a third, intermediate, notion (intermediate global Supervenience). I argue that (a) weak global Supervenience is not an adequate notion of dependence; (b) weak global Supervenience does not capture certain assumptions about coincidence relations; (c) these assumptions are better accommodated by the stronger notion of intermediate global Supervenience; (d) intermediate global Supervenience, however, is also not an adequate notion of dependence; and (e) strong global Supervenience is an adequate notion of dependence. It also fits in with anti-individualism about the mental. It does not, however, serve to rebut arguments against coincident entities.
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More on Global Supervenience
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1999Co-Authors: Oron ShagrirAbstract: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. Global Supervenience is seen as an important version of non-reductive materialism. It is especially attractive to non-reductivists with anti-individualistic inclinations. But there are also worries that global Supervenience falls short of establishing important aspects of a materialist picture of the mind. Jaegwon Kim,' for example, argues that there are non-materialist scenarios that are compatible with global Supervenience. More recently, Paull and Sider2 and Terence Horgan3 attempt to defend global Supervenience from these charges. I argue that their defense is only partially successful. It succeeds in meeting one challenge to global Supervenience, but fails to meet others. I then suggest that global Supervenience can be salvaged if it is combined with weak Supervenience. The combination of global and weak Supervenience, I argue, is a serious option for non-reductive materialists who are also antiindividualists.
Stephan Leuenberger - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Supervenience among classes of relations
2013Co-Authors: Stephan LeuenbergerAbstract:This paper extends the definition of strong Supervenience to cover classes of relations of any adicity, including transworld relations. It motivates that project by showing that not all interesting Supervenience claims involving relations are global Supervenience claims. The proposed definition has five welcome features: it reduces to the familiar definition in the special case where the classes contain only monadic properties; it equips Supervenience with the expected formal properties, such as transitivity and monotonicity; it entails that a relation supervenes on its converse; it classifies certain paradigms correctly; it makes distinctions even in the realm of the non-contingent, as witnessed by the fact that identity does not supervene on any class of relations. Finally, the paper applies the defined concept, and the related concept of orthogonality, to the study of internal and external relations.
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From Grounding to Supervenience
Erkenntnis, 2013Co-Authors: Stephan LeuenbergerAbstract:The concept of Supervenience and a regimented concept of grounding are often taken to provide rival explications of pre-theoretical concepts of dependence and determination. Friends of grounding typically point out that Supervenience claims do not entail corresponding grounding claims. Every fact supervenes on itself, but is not grounded in itself, and the fact that a thing exists supervenes on the fact that its singleton exists, but is not grounded in it. Common lore has it, though, that grounding claims do entail corresponding Supervenience claims. In this article, I show that this assumption is problematic. On one way of understanding it, the corresponding Supervenience claim is just an entailment claim under a different name. On another way of understanding it, the corresponding claim is a distinctive Supervenience claim, but its specification gives rise to what I call the "reference type problem": to associate the classes of facts that are the relata of grounding with the types of facts that are the relata of Supervenience. However it is understood, Supervenience rules out prima facie possibilities: alien realizers, blockers, heterogeneous realizers, floaters, and heterogeneous blockers. Instead of being rival explications of one and the same pre-theoretical concept, grounding and Supervenience may be complementary concepts capturing different aspects of determination and dependence.
Emad H Atiq - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Supervenience repeatability expressivism
Social Science Research Network, 2019Co-Authors: Emad H AtiqAbstract:Expressivists traditionally explain normative Supervenience by saying it is a conceptual truth. I argue against this tradition in two steps. First, I show the modal claim that stands in need of explanation has been stated imprecisely. Classic arguments in metaethics for normative Supervenience and those that rely on it as a premise presuppose a constraint on the Supervenience base that is rarely (if ever) made explicit: the repeatability of the non-normative properties on which the normative supervenes. Non-normative properties are repeatable when it is possible for numerically distinct individuals to share them. Second, I show if the modal truth that stands in need of explanation entails that there are individuals exactly alike in repeatable non-normative respects that cannot normatively differ, then standard expressivist accounts of normative Supervenience as a conceptual truth are unsuccessful. Expressivist metasemantics for normative terms, together with constitutive facts about the non-cognitive attitudes essentially involved in normative thought, strongly suggest that repeatable Supervenience could not be a conceptual truth. I argue, finally, that although repeatable Supervenience bears the marks of a conceptual truth, expressivists should be content to treat it as an ordinary normative truth, and to explain it the same way they explain other normative truths.
Theodore Sider - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Global Supervenience and Identity across Times and Worlds
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1999Co-Authors: Theodore SiderAbstract:The existence and importance of Supervenience principles for identity across times and worlds have been noted, but insufficient attention has been paid to their precise nature. Such attention is repaid with philosophical dividends. The issues in the formulation of the Supervenience principles are two. The first involves the relevant variety of Supervenience: that variety is global, but there are in fact two versions of global Supervenience that must be distinguished. The second involves the subject matter: the names "identity over time" and "identity across worlds" are misnomers, for in neither case is identity at issue. The philosophical dividends then follow. Nathan Salmon's argument that identity over time needs no "grounds" in matters of qualitative fact can be answered, as can an argument offered by many, that coincident objects (such as statues and lumps of clay) would require objectionably ungrounded differences in identities across times and worlds. Supervenience principles assert a kind of functional dependence of one sort of fact on another. They take this form: indiscernibility in such-and-such respect entails indiscernibility in thus-and-so respect. The claim that the mental supervenes on the physical is the claim that the mental is a function of the physical-physical indiscernibility implies mental indiscernibility. Such principles take on interest for various related reasons. One is that asserting Supervenience is a maximally cautious way to assert dependence: psychophysical Supervenience is something all materialists can agree on, even if they disagree over whether mentality can be reduced in any finite or intelligible way. Another is that Supervenience is presupposed by analysis. Various analyses of mentality in physical terms differ in details, but all presuppose Supervenience, for a physical analysans will not distinguish between physical indiscernibles, and hence the mental analysandum will not either. Though the philosophy of mind may be the most familiar area in which Supervenience has been applied, the same reasons for being interested in Supervenience apply elsewhere. The notions of "identity over time" and "transworld identity" raise some of the same issues as does mentality. Theses claiming that facts about identity across worlds and times involve nothing
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In defense of global Supervenience
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1992Co-Authors: R. Cranston Paull, Theodore SiderAbstract:In recent years many philosophers have defended nonreductive materialism. According to this view, the special sciences are irreducible to physics even though all non-physical facts are determined by (and depend upon) physical facts. The notion of Supervenience has played a prominent role in the thinking of these philosophers.' To see that this is no accident we need only consider the two main desiderata that Supervenience relations are meant to capture: (i) the dependence of the supervening properties on the subvenient, or base, properties and (ii) the irreducibility of the supervening properties (and hence of the sciences that study them). In his recent Presidential Address to the APA, and elsewhere, Jaegwon Kim has argued that none of the standard Supervenience relations found in the literature are capable of capturing both of these desiderata.2 A relation strong enough to ensure dependence, says Kim, will be so strong that it will jeopardize irreducibility. A relation weak enough to be compatible with irreducibility will be too weak to yield dependence. Kim's conclusion is that nonreductive materialism is not a viable option for philosophers of mind. Kim pays particular attention to the relation of global Supervenience which is thought by many to be the version of Supervenience that best satisfies the two desiderata and is therefore available to nonreductive materialists. He claims that, while it is weak enough not to endanger irreducibility, global Supervenience is too weak to satisfy the first desideratum of dependency. We deny this claim. We will show that Kim's arguments do not establish that global Supervenience is too weak to count as a respectable dependency relation. The problem with the arguments originates in his discussion of the nonequivalence of strong and global Supervenience.
Jamie Dreier - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Is there a Supervenience problem for robust moral realism?
Philosophical Studies, 2019Co-Authors: Jamie DreierAbstract:The paper describes the problem for robust moral realism of explaining the Supervenience of the moral on the non-moral, and examines five objections to the argument: (1) The moral does not supervene on the descriptive, because we may owe different obligations to duplicates. (2) If the Supervenience thesis is repaired to block (1), it becomes trivial and easy to explain. (3) Supervenience is a moral doctrine and should get an explanation from within normative ethics rather than metaethics. (4) Supervenience is a conceptual truth and should be explained by the nature of our concepts rather than by a metaphysical theory. (5) The moral does not supervene on the descriptive, because moral principles are not metaphysically necessary. It concludes that none of these objections is successful, so Robust Realists do have an explanatory debt to worry about.