Taking supervenioence seriously
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Abstract
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This paper delves into the concept of supervenience in philosophy, particularly in relation to emergence as discussed by Kim, and its implications within the context of computer science through examples from the Game of Life. It argues that supervenience may not provide the explanatory power commonly attributed to it, proposing that the challenges of understanding supervenience also reflect broader philosophical issues regarding reduction and implementation. A distinction is made between single domain and multiple domain supervenience, emphasizing the implications of these concepts for interdisciplinary discourse.
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This paper explores the explanatory adequacy of lower-level theories when their higher-level counterparts are irreducible. If some state or entity described by a high-level theory supervenes upon and is realized in events, entities, etc. described by the relevant lower-level theory, does the latter fully explain the higher-level event even if the higher-level theory is irreducible? While the autonomy of the special sciences and the success of various eliminativist programs depends in large part on how we answer this question, neither the affirmative or negative answer has been defended in detail. I argue, contra Putnam and others, that certain facts about causation and explanation show that such lower-level theories do explain. I also argue, however, that there may be important questions about counterfactuals and laws that such explanations cannot answer, thereby showing their partial inadequacy. I defend the latter claim against criticisms based on eliminativism about higher-level explanations and sketch a number of empirical conditions that lower-level explanations would have to meet to fully explain higher-level events. Most c o n t e m p o r a r y philosophers have given up the positivist tenet that the special sciences are strictly reducible to their lower-level counterparts. Mental predicates, for example, seem unlikely to m a t c h up neatly-as traditional accounts of reduction require-with the kinds of neurophysiology, and m u c h the same holds for biological and social predicates visa -vis those of chemistry and psychology, respectively. Nonetheless, it is generally agreed that such irreducibility does not entail that higher-level p h e n o m e n a described by the special sciences are s o m e h o w autonomous, for they can supervene upon and be realized in the appropriate lower-level p h e n o m e n a-ultimately the physical-even if higher-level theories are not reducible to those at a lower level. While we m a y never be able to define biological predicates, for example, in chemical terms, we can still hold with g o o d reason that the chemical facts fix the biological facts and that every biological event is b r o u g h t about by or realized in chemical p h e n o m e n a. Thus the notions of supervenience and realization preserve the ontological primacy of the physical: irreducibility of theories does not c o m m i t us to nonphysical entities such as souls, vital forces, world
Jaegwon Kim’s supervenience argument purports to show that epiphenomenalism about the mental follows from premises that any nonreductive physicalist should find acceptable. Kim regards his argument as a reductio ad absurdum of nonreductive physicalism. We reconstruct and evaluate the latest version of Kim’s argument. We argue that the premises of Kim’s argument are much less innocent than they may appear. In particular, we single out for criticism an unstated assumption about the identity conditions of events, and we argue that this assumption could be seen as all by itself implying that nonreductive physicalism is false, thus begging the question against that position. It is also dubious, we argue, whether Kim’s unstated assumption is even consistent with one of the stated assumptions of his argument, “the principle of causal exclusion”, given a standard understanding of causal overdetermination.
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"Supervenience and Physicalism" 1 Supervenience and Physica l i sm Discussion of the supervenience relation in the philosophical literature of recent years has become almost Byzantine in its intricacy and diversity. Subtle modulations of the basic concept have been tooled and retooled with increasing frequency, until supervenience has lost nearly all its original lustre as a simple and powerful tool for cracking open refractory philosophical problems. I present a conceptual model of the supervenience relation that captures all the important extant concepts without ignoring the complexities uncovered during work over the past two decades. I test the usefulness of my analysis by applying it to the problem of defining physicalism, concluding that the thesis of physicalism is best captured by the conjunction of two supervenience relations of different modal strength.
Our main purpose in this essay is to evaluate the scope of Jaegwon Kim’s ‘supervenience argument’ for reduction. The issue that we want to investigate is whether its conclusion only applies to psychology or it generalizes to all the special sciences. Our contention is that the claim that the supervenience argument generalizes to all the special sciences is ambiguous. We will distinguish three different readings of this objection, and suggest that some of them make it a plausible claim whereas other readings do not make it plausible enough.
concept of supervenience involves the following three requirements: non-entailment requirement (i.e. no properties of the set A can be entailed in the set B), indiscernibility requirement (as expressed by the first definition above), existential dependence requirement (as expressed by the second definition).

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