Supervenience and physicalism

2000

Weak and global supervenience are equivalent to strong supervenience for intrinsic properties. Moreover, weak and global supervenience relations are always mere parts of a more general underlying strong supervenience relation. Most appeals to global supervenience, though, involve spatio-temporally relational properties; but here too, global and strong supervenience are equivalent. Functionally we can characterize merely weak and global supervenience as follows: for A to supervene on B requires that at all worlds an individual's A properties be a function of its B properties, where this function varies from world to world. But what are the metaphysical commitments of such a relation? We can make metaphysical sense of this functional requirement only if the properties in question are second-order properties, the functionalist theory of the mind being a conspicuous example. Weak and Global Supervenience Back in the days of free love, supervenience relations were welcomed as harbingers of peace and joy. "Let one hundred supervenience concepts bloom!" came the prophet's cry. 1 And bloom they did! As a result, supervenience now comes in a plethora of permutations: weak and strong, local and global, multiple-and single-domain, indiscernible and similarity-based, modal and de facto, all appealing to a variety of 'possible's from the familiar metaphysical, nomological, and epistemic to the rarer historical and temporal-a flavor to fit every palate! But, alas, the heyday of supervenience has come and gone. Now, surveying this surfeit of superveniences, we wonder if the multitude of proposed variations are truly useful or rather, in Lewis's words, "an unlovely proliferation of non-equivalent definitions"? 2 Are they aiding us in our quest to unravel the metaphysical mysteries of how one sort of thing can depend upon another? Or do they only help "to add mystery to mystery, to cover one obscurantist move with another," as Schiffer insists? 3 Kim sees the growing numbers of supervenience concepts in the literature as good evidence that they are useful in philosophy. 4 Cynics might instead think this merely reflects the ease with which one can alter the standard formulations and thereby create yet another supervenience relation-or, worse yet, another family of them. A thorough house-cleaning would require a careful examination of every supervenience notion that has been proposed, a cure worse than the disease. Rather, I propose to examine the predominant notions of supervenience. Strong supervenience, like all supervenience relations, can be reformulated, more perspicuously I suggest, in 1 Kim, "Supervenience as a Philosophical Concept," p. 155. 2 Lewis, "On the Plurality of Worlds," p. 14. 3 Remnants of Meaning, p. 153-154. 4 "Supervenience as a Philosophical Concept," p. 133.

The term ‘supervenience’ has acquired central status in contemporary philosophy in the wake of Davidson’s discussion (1970) of mental e physical properties. We want to recover Davidson’s original setting and to tackle the same problem by an alternative route, which resorts to a phenomenological approach. The notion of supervenience emerges at the crossroad between three theses: 1) the background of ontological monism; 2) the interpretation of monism as physicalism; 3) the dependence of mental events on physical events. ‘Supervenience’ bears the task to express simultaneously the ontological dependence of the mental on the physical and the apparent irreducibility of the former to the latter. In this framework, we are going, first, to grant ontological monism while rejecting physicalism. We will argue for an ontological framework that acknowledges some of the reasons of classical idealism, without abandoning a materialist framework. Secondly, we are going to show why intentional phenomena can never be regarded as epiphenomena. This move recommends a renewed methodological ‘respect’ for phenomena, consistent with the phenomenological tradition. Thirdly, by reinterpreting the old notion of formal causality, we will make room for an understanding of ‘mental causation’ that avoids both dualism and any violation of the principle of conservation of energy. In conclusion, we are going to argue that the reasons that originally motivated the introduction of ‘supervenience’ are inconsistent and that, in the theoretical context that we argue for, resorting to the notion of supervenience is either superfluous or misleading.

The Philosophical Quarterly, 2009

We provide a formulation of physicalism, and show that this is to be favoured over alternative formulations. Much of the literature on physicalism assumes without argument that there is a fundamental level to reality, and we show that a consideration of the levels problem and its implications for physicalism tells in favour of the form of physicalism proposed here. Its key elements are, first, that the empirical and substantive part of physicalism amounts to a prediction that physics will not posit new entities solely for the purpose of accounting for mental phenomena, nor new entities with essentially mental characteristics such as propositional attitudes or intentions; secondly, that physicalism can safely make do with no more than a weak global formulation of supervenience.

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.

Physicalism is, simply put, the thesis that everything concrete is physical. It is an intuitive notion that captures the idea that all of the objects and properties in the world surrounding us are physical. This intuitive idea of physicalism is usually formally stated using the philosophical concept of supervenience. Physicalism is true if and only if everything supervenes on the physical. As with all serious and deep questions philosophers differ as to the exact meaning of the terms involved in this definition. Indeed even after perfunctory glance one will note that the terms everything, supervene, and physical require disambiguating clarification. In this essay I am going to accept that the concept of supervenience provides a satisfactory framework in which to discuss the relation between higher-level entities and basic physical substrates. It will be my contention that a particular type of supervenience, what I shall call Weak Local Supervenience, is sufficient for a definition of physicalism. In the first section I will give a precise characterisation of the world W in which I shall set the argument of this paper. In the second section of this paper I shall give a precise characterisation of Weak Local Supervenience. In the third section I shall argue that it is the feature that I shall call intra-world invariance that gives Weak Local Supervenience the sufficient strength and I shall attempt to show that Kim’s criticisms of Weak Supervenience are misguided. The nature of the intra-world invariance is counterfactual supporting, and this leads to a collapse of Weak Supervenience, in this particular domain, into Strong Supervenience, in particular nomological supervenience.

Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2009

philosophy-online.de

Kim's so-called "Supervenience Argument" is one of the most important arguments against nonreductive physicalism, the position that dominates current philosophy of mind. Kim has formulated various versions of this argument since the late eighties, and in his latest book (Kim 2005), he has defended it against various criticisms that have been raised by his opponents. The current paper assesses Kim's response to one of the most important criticisms, the so-called "Generalization Argument" according to which, if sound, the Supervenience Argument would not only show that there is no mental causation, but also that there is no biological, no chemical, no geological causation etc.

Synthese

The philosophical technical term "supervenience" is frequently used in the philosophy of mind as a concise way of characterizing the core idea of physicalism in a manner that is neutral with respect to debates between reductive physicalists and nonreductive physicalists. I argue against this alleged neutrality and side with reductive physicalists. I am especially interested here in debates between psychoneural reductionists and nonreductive functionalist physicalists. Central to my arguments will be considerations concerning how best to articulate the spirit of the idea of supervenience. I argue for a version of supervenience, "fine-grained supervenience," which is the claim that if, at a given time, a single entity instantiates two distinct mental properties, it must do so in virtue of instantiating two distinct physical properties. I argue further that despite initial appearances to the contrary, such a construal of supervenience can be embraced only by reductive physicalists.

Synthese, 1988

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

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 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 the interpreter cannot revise her past attributions to the two individuals.