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Kim’s Supervenience Argument and Nonreductive Physicalism

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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show that Kim’s ‚supervenience argument’ is at best inconclusive and so fails to provide an adequate challenge to nonreductive physicalism. I shall argue, first, that Kim’s argument rests on assumptions that the nonreductive physicalist is entitled to regard as question-begging; second, that even if those assumptions are granted, it is not clear that irreducible mental causes fail to␣satisfy them; and, third, that since the argument has the overall structure of a reductio, which of its various premises one performs the reductio on remains open to debate in an interesting way. I shall finally suggest that the issue of reductive vs. nonreductive physicalism is best contested not in the arena of mental causation but in that in which the issues pertaining to theory and property reduction are currently being debated.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Jürgen Schröder and Itay Shany for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Special thanks also to Juhani Yli-Vakkuri for extended discussions of the issues raised in part 4 of this paper. I also benefitted from the helpful comments of an anonymous referee for this journal. Support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada is also hereby acknowledged.

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  1. University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada, N6A 3K7

    Ausonio Marras

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Marras, A. Kim’s Supervenience Argument and Nonreductive Physicalism. Erkenntnis 66, 305–327 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-006-9023-0

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