The thesis that mental properties are dependent, or supervenient, on physical properties, but this dependence is not lawlike, has been influential in contemporary philosophy of mind. It is put forward explicitly in Donald Davidson's seminal ‘Mental Events.’ On the one hand, Davidson claims that the mental is anomalous, that ‘there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained’ (1970, 208), and, in particular, that there are no strict psychophysical laws. On the (...) other hand, he insists that the mental supervenes on the physical; that ‘mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics’ (1970, 214). (shrink)

The thesis that mental properties are dependent, or supervenient, on physical properties, but this dependence is not lawlike, has been influential in contemporary philosophy of mind. It is put forward explicitly in Donald Davidson's seminal ‘Mental Events.’ On the one hand, Davidson claims that the mental is anomalous, that ‘there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained’, and, in particular, that there are no strict psychophysical laws. On the other hand, (...) he insists that the mental supervenes on the physical; that ‘mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics’. (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)

There will be a few themes. One to get us going: expansion versus contraction. About an object, o, and the region, R, of space(time) in which o is exactly located,1 we may ask: i) must there exist expansions of o: objects in filled superregions2 of R? ii) must there exist contractions of o: objects in filled subregions of..

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

I discuss puzzles involving coinciding material objects (such as statues and their constitutive lumps of clay) and propose solutions.

Kim argues that weak and global supervenience are too weak to guarantee any sort of dependency. Of the three original forms of supervenience, strong, weak, and global, each commonly wielded across all branches of philosophy, two are thus cast aside as uninteresting or useless. His arguments, however, fail to appreciate the strength of weak and global supervenience. I investigate what weak and global supervenience relations are functionally and how they relate to strong supervenience. For a large class of properties, weak (...) and global supervenience are equivalent to strong supervenience. I then offer a series of arguments showing that it is precisely because of their strength, not their weakness, that both weak and global supervenience are useless in characterizing any dependencies of interest to philosophers. (shrink)

The relation of global supervenience is widely appealed to in philosophy. In slogan form, it is explained as follows: a class of properties A supervenes on a class of properties B if no two worlds differ in the distribution of A-properties without differing in the distribution of B-properties. It turns out, though, that there are several ways to cash out that slogan. Three different proposals have been discussed in the literature. In this paper, I argue that none of them is (...) adequate. Furthermore, I present a puzzle that reveals a tension in our concept of global supervenience. (shrink)

Universal reductionism—the sort of project pursued by Carnap in the Aufbau, Lewis in his campaign on behalf of Humean supervenience, Jackson in From Metaphysics to Ethics, and Chalmers in Constructing the World—aims to reduce everything to some specified base, more or less austere as it may be. In this paper, I identify two constraints that a promising strategy to argue for universal reductionism needs to satisfy: the exhaustion constraint and the chaining constraint. As a case study, I then consider Chalmers’ (...) Constructing the World, in which a priori implication, or “scrutability”, plays the role of reduction. Chalmers first divides up the total vocabulary of our language into different families, and then argues, for each family separately, that truths involving expressions in that family are scrutable from the putative base. He does not systematically address the question whether “cross-family sentences”—sentences involving expressions from more than one family—are scrutable. I shall argue that this lacuna cannot be filled, since scrutability does not allow for the exhaustion constraint and the chaining constraint to be jointly satisfied. I further suggest that Carnap’s account, in which definability plays the role of reduction, has better prospects of meeting these constraints. (shrink)

Supervenience is a topic-neutral, broadly logical relation between classes of properties or facts. In a slogan, A supervenes on B if and only if there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference. The first part of this paper considers different ways in which that slogan has been cashed out. The second part discusses applications of concepts of supervenience, focussing on the question whether they may provide an explication of determination theses such as physicalism.

Supervenience is necessary co-variation between two sets of entities. In the good old days, supervenience was considered a useful philosophical tool with a wide range of applications in the philosophy of mind, metaethics, epistemology, and elsewhere. In recent years, however, supervenience has fallen out of favor, giving place to grounding, realization, and other, more metaphysically “meaty”, notions. The emerging consensus is that there are principled reasons for which explanatory theses cannot be captured in terms of supervenience, or as the slogan (...) goes: “Supervenience Is Nonexplanatory”. While SIN is widely endorsed, it is far from clear what it amounts to and why we should believe it. In this paper, I will distinguish various theses that could be meant by it, and will argue that none of them is both interesting and plausible: on some interpretations of ‘explanatory’, we have no reason to believe that supervenience is unexplanatory, while on other interpretations, supervenience is indeed unexplanatory, but widely accepted textbook cases of explanatory relations come out as unexplanatory, too. This result raises doubts as to whether there is any interesting sense in which SIN is true, and suggests that the contemporary consensus about supervenience is mistaken. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to define a notion of supervenience which can adequately describe the systematic dependence of extrinsic as well as of intrinsic higher-level properties on base-level features. We argue that none of the standard notions of supervenience—the concepts of weak, strong and global supervenience—fulfil this function. The concept of regional supervenience, which is purported to improve on the standard conceptions, turns out to be problematic as well. As a new approach, we develop the notion of property-dependent (...) supervenience. This notion is founded on a criterion of relevance adapting the supervenience base to the considered higher-level properties in a specific way, such that only features which are relevant to the instantiation of the higher-level properties under consideration are taken into account. (shrink)

Roughly speaking, perdurantism is the view that ordinary objects persist through time by having temporal parts, whilst endurantism is the view that they persist by being wholly present at different times. (Speaking less roughly will be important later.) It is often thought that perdurantists have an advantage over endurantists when dealing with objects which appear to coincide temporarily: lumps, statues, cats, tail-complements, bisected brains, repaired ships, and the like. Some cases – personal fission, for example – seem to involve temporary (...) coincidence between objects of the same kind. Other cases – a cat and its flesh, a statue and its lump – seem to involve objects of different kinds. (shrink)

In recent years, the project of providing microeconomic foundations for macroeconomics has taken on new urgency. Some philosophers and economists have challenged the project, both for the way economists actually approach microfoundations and for more general anti-reductionist reasons. Reductionists and anti-reductionists alike, however, have taken it to be trivial that the macroeconomic facts are exhaustively determined by microeconomic ones. In this paper, I challenge this supposed triviality. I argue that macroeconomic properties do not even globally supervene on microeconomic ones. This (...) is simply a consequence of the difference in the explanatory goals of the respective fields, which implicitly carve out the microeconomic property set in such a way that it underdetermines macroeconomic properties. It means, however, that microeconomics-based foundations for macroeconomics are inadequate in principle. (shrink)

The thesis of methodological individualism in social science is commonly divided into two different claims—explanatory individualism and ontological individualism. Ontological individualism is the thesis that facts about individuals exhaustively determine social facts. Initially taken to be a claim about the identity of groups with sets of individuals or their properties, ontological individualism has more recently been understood as a global supervenience claim. While explanatory individualism has remained controversial, ontological individualism thus understood is almost universally accepted. In this paper I argue (...) that ontological individualism is false. Only if the thesis is weakened to the point that it is equivalent to physicalism can it be true, but then it fails to be a thesis about the determination of social facts by facts about individual persons. Even when individualistic facts are expanded to include people’s local environments and practices, I shall argue, those still underdetermine the social facts that obtain. If true, this has implications for explanation as well as ontology. I first consider arguments against the local supervenience of social facts on facts about individuals, correcting some flaws in existing arguments and affirming that local supervenience fails for a broad set of social properties. I subsequently apply a similar approach to defeat a particularly weak form of global supervenience, and consider potential responses. Finally, I explore why it is that people have taken ontological individualism to be true. (shrink)

'Ontological dependence' is a term of philosophical jargon which stands for a rich family of properties and relations, often taken to be among the most fundamental ontological properties and relations. Notions of ontological dependence are usually thought of as 'carving reality at its ontological joints', and as marking certain forms of ontological 'non-self-sufficiency'. The use of notions of dependence goes back as far as Aristotle's characterization of substances, and these notions are still widely used to characterize other concepts and to (...) formulate metaphysical claims. This paper first gives an overview of the varieties of these notions, and then discusses some of their main applications. (shrink)

Two versions of global supervenience have recently been distinguished from each other. I introduce a third version, which is more likely what people had in mind all along. However, I argue that one of the three versions is equivalent to strong supervenience in every sense that matters, and that neither of the other two versions counts as a genuine determination relation. I conclude that global supervenience has little metaphysically distinctive value.

Pluralists argue for the distinctness of coinciding objects on the grounds that they have different properties. The grounding problem is the problem of explaining how the supposed difference in properties can arise in the first place. This paper considers this problem as an instance of a more general phenomenon, namely, the problem of dealing with underdetermination in asymmetrical systems admitting of non-trivial automorphisms. It argues in favour of primitivism by developing an account of stochastic grounding that makes room for non-fundamental (...) bruteness and substantially mitigates the costs of primitivism. (shrink)

Social ontology is the study of the nature and properties of the social world. It is concerned with analyzing the various entities in the world that arise from social interaction. -/- A prominent topic in social ontology is the analysis of social groups. Do social groups exist at all? If so, what sorts of entities are they, and how are they created? Is a social group distinct from the collection of people who are its members, and if so, how is (...) it different? What sorts of properties do social groups have? Can they have beliefs or intentions? Can they perform actions? And if so, what does it take for a group to believe, intend, or act? -/- Other entities investigated in social ontology include money, corporations, institutions, property, social classes, races, genders, artifacts, artworks, language, and law. It is difficult to delineate a precise scope for the field (see section 2.1). In general, though, the entities explored in social ontology largely overlap with those that social scientists work on. A good deal of the work in social ontology takes place within the social sciences (see sections 5.1–5.8). -/- Social ontology also addresses more basic questions about the nature of the social world. One set of questions pertains to the constituents, or building blocks, of social things in general. For instance, some theories argue that social entities are built out of the psychological states of individual people, while others argue that they are built out of actions, and yet others that they are built out of practices. Still other theories deny that a distinction can even be made between the social and the non-social. -/- A different set of questions pertains to how social categories are constructed or set up. Are social categories and kinds produced by our attitudes? By our language? Are they produced by causal patterns? And is there just one way social categories are set up, or are there many varieties of social construction? -/- The term ‘social ontology’ has only come into wide currency in recent years, but the nature of the social has been a topic of inquiry since ancient Greece. As a whole, the field can be understood as a branch of metaphysics, the general inquiry into the nature of entities. (shrink)

This chapter considers potential applications of grounding to the formulation of physicalism. I begin with an overview of competing conceptions of the physical and of physicalism. I then consider whether grounding physicalism overcomes well-known and seemingly fatal problems with supervenience physicalism. I conclude that while grounding physicalism improves upon supervenience physicalism in certain respects, it arguably falls victim to some of the same difficulties.

A survey of the connection between grounding and modality, in particular supervenience. The survey explores three possible connections between grounding and supervenience: (1) supervenience can be analyzed in terms of grounding, (2) grounded facts supervene on their grounds, and (3) grounding and supervenience overlap in their theoretical roles.

An encyclopedia entry which covers various revisionary conceptions of which macroscopic objects there are, and the puzzles and arguments that motivate these conceptions: sorites arguments, the argument from vagueness, the puzzles of material constitution, arguments against indeterminate identity, arguments from arbitrariness, debunking arguments, the overdetermination argument, and the problem of the many.

Can different material objects have the same parts at all times at which they exist? This paper defends the possibility of such coincidence against the main argument to the contrary, the ‘Indiscernibility Argument’. According to this argument, the modal supervenes on the nonmodal, since, after all, the non-modal is what grounds the modal; hence, it would be utterly mysterious if two objects sharing all parts had different essential properties. The weakness of the argument becomes apparent once we understand how the (...) modal is grounded in the nonmodal. By extending the ideas of combinatorialism so that we recombine haecceities as well as fundamental properties, we see how modal properties can be grounded in non-modal properties in a way that allows coincidence and yet also explains why there are differences in the modal properties of coinciding objects. Despite this, some de re modal facts are not grounded in the non-modal but instead are brute. However, although we cannot explain why a particular object has the basic modal properties it has, we can explain a closely related, semantic fact and, comparing the facts we can’t explain to more familiar brute facts, we understand why there should be no better explanation. As a result, we can see how coincidence is, after all, possible. (shrink)