Abstract
A prominent objection to supervenience physicalism is that a definition of physicalism in terms of supervenience allows for physicalism to be compatible with nonphysicalist outlooks, such as certain forms of emergentism. I take as my starting point a recent defense of supervenience physicalism from this objection. According to this line of thought, the subvenient base for emergent properties cannot be said to be purely physical; rather, it is “polluted” with emergent features in virtue of necessarily giving rise to them. Thus, if emergentism is true, it is false that everything supervenes on physical properties. I argue that this gives way to a new challenge for supervenience physicalism. The challenge, roughly, is to distinguish the emergentist’s “polluted” base from a physical supervenience base; that is, to give conditions under which the subvenient base is not “polluted” by supervenient properties. The problem, I argue, is that it is hard to see how this can be done without collapsing supervenience physicalism into alternative approaches to physicalism. I thus argue that if the present defense of supervenience physicalism succeeds in defending the adequacy of a supervenience-based definition of physicalism, it does so by compromising its uniqueness.
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Notes
It is not obvious that (2) and (3) are independent: perhaps (2) entails that the necessitation of emergent properties by physical properties is “brute”; likewise, it may be that (3) entails (2). Nonetheless, subsequent discussion will primarily concern the relationship between (1) and (2). Fn. 4 provides some justification for this preference; I discuss the issue of brute supervenience, and its relation to the topics here discussed, in Morris (unpublished).
See Broad (1925). Emergentism, as given by (1), (2), and (3), corresponds to what Stoljar (2010) calls “necessitation dualism”. Defenses of the coherence of this variety of emergentism can be extracted from McLaughlin (1992), O’Connor (1994), Stephan (1997), Vision (2011), and Wilson (2005); see also Welshon (2002). “Emergentism” is sometimes used to refer to views that either deny (1) (say, because they endorse a weaker supervenience thesis) or deny (2) (say, because they use “emergent” to label any property of a whole that is not easily attributed to the parts of that whole).
See Chalmers (1996), Hawthorne (2002), Howell (2009), Jackson (1998), Kim (1984, 1987), McLaughlin (1995), and Stoljar (2010) for discussion of issues that arise in stating the intended supervenience thesis. As suggested by the remarks in the main text, many of the issues that arise in this context are not relevant to those here of interest and so will be set aside.
Whether the “brute supervenience” thesis at (3) is itself in conflict with physicalism is, I believe, less obvious than is sometimes supposed. For while “brute supervenience” may be objectionable for general metaphysical reasons (see, for example, Hill 2009) it is not easy to identify why it should be specifically problematic for a physicalist (Horgan 1993 asserts that it is, and Melnyk 2003 provides some arguments; but for critical discussion, see Polger 2013). I believe that if (3) is incompatible with the core components of physicalism, this is most likely just because it entails something like (2); this provides some justification for focusing on the relationship between (1) and (2), and not on the issue of brute supervenience.
For an insightful recent discussion and evaluation of this idea, see Pereboom (2011).
Kim (2005) supposes that functionalism is closely related to the “physicalistic acceptability” of putative nonphysical features of the world; likewise, in arguing for a kind of dualism, Chalmers (1996) emphasizes that phenomenal properties seem to be neither functional properties nor structural properties. O’Connor (1994) characterizes emergent properties, in part, as properties of a thing that are not constituted by the properties of the parts of a thing. A further strategy for explicating nonphysicalist supervenient novelty is to explicate this in terms of the “brute supervenience” thesis (3), as suggested in Stephan (1997).
For a different argument, see Kim (1999, 2011). Kim argues that a supervenience thesis like (1) is incompatible with specifically causal novelty, and thus that emergentism is incoherent if the novelty attributed to emergent properties is intended to be causal; Kim (2011) uses this observation to defend supervenience physicalism. While an evaluation of Kim’s strategy for defending supervenience physicalism is beyond the scope of this paper, I believe that it faces issues similar to those discussed in §3; see Morris (forthcoming). Chalmers (1996) and Jackson (1998) also can be read as defending the adequacy of supervenience physicalism; see fn. 20 for discussion.
The variety of base pollution that Howell identifies should be distinguished from “strong” pollution, in which the base properties are not merely attributed dispositions to give rise to nonphysical properties, but rather the nonphysical properties are placed amongst the base properties. Consider, for example, the claim that property dualism or “double aspect theory” supports panpsychism, since only in this case will it be possible to explain why, when certain components come together in certain ways, necessarily certain experiences result (Nagel 1986; Strawson 2006). On one way of understanding this claim, it is not just that physical properties have “experiential being” in virtue of necessitating conscious experiences, but rather it is that “experiential being” is as basic as the physical properties themselves. That there is a difference between strong base pollution and the kind of base pollution that Howell identifies does not show that the latter is trivial, or that properties that are “polluted” in this way by emergent properties are easily regarded as physical properties.
See Howell (2009) for some additional details. Following Wilson (2005), Howell (2009, pp. 93–95) argues that the best way for an emergentist to account for emergent properties metaphysically supervening on physical properties is to endorse necessitarianism, as the view that laws of nature, in general, express necessary truths. And on such a view, properties will be individuated by the laws in which they figure. While Howell may be right that necessitarianism is the best way for an emergentist to makes sense of emergent properties metaphysically supervening on physical properties, and that on such a view, properties will be individuated by the laws in which they figure, it is not clear to me that the base pollution defense turns on a specific construal of property individuation. Rather, the core point just challenges us to say how a property that necessarily gives rise to a dualistic property could itself be regarded as a physical property. As the remarks in the main text suggest, I believe that the worry is legitimate, and that there is no easy response.
While Howell focuses on synchronic necessitation relations, related considerations apply to diachronic causal relations, particularly if properties are individuated, or in some manner constituted, by causal powers (Shoemaker 1980/2003). This issue becomes poignant if allegedly physical properties are claimed to synchronically give rise, say, to mental properties in virtue of sharing causal powers with mental properties: in other words, if it is claimed that mental properties are necessitated by physical properties in virtue of mental properties being individuated by a subset of the causal powers of physical properties (Shoemaker 2007; Wilson 1999; see §3). Such a claim will not do much to support physicalism if the powers that the putative physical properties share with the mental properties, in virtue of which they necessitate them, are characterized in irreducibly mental terms. It will be true that the powers of mental properties are included among the powers of physical properties, but only by sacrificing any clear sense in which the physical properties are, indeed, physical (see Morris 2011 for further discussion; Kim 2010 makes a related point).
The demand is not simply that a supervenience physicalist provide an account of what “the physical” amounts to. Perhaps any definition of physicalism should say something about what makes an entity a physical entity. In this way, it is uncontroversial that a supervenience physicalist will have to say what he or she has in mind in claiming that everything supervenes on the physical—as, say, a “realization physicalist” will have to say what he or she has in mind in claiming that all properties are realized by physical properties and only physical properties (Melnyk 2003; Shoemaker 2007; see below). But the present issues arise specifically for supervenience definitions, for they characterize physicalism in terms of properties supervening on physical properties, which is what an emergentist also wants to claim. On the other hand, it is doubtful that an emergentist will want to claim, for example, that emergent properties are physically realized, given standard ways of understanding physical realization (see §3).
For an alternative approach to functionalism, see Shoemaker (2007).
For details, see Kim (1998), Melnyk (2003), and Morris (2010). Whether talk of physical conditions is needed in addition to talk about physical properties has to do with whether the physical laws in which a physical property figures, or the causal powers associated with a physical property, are essential or nonessential features of it. In either case, physical conditions will necessitate physically realized functional properties; the issue is just whether these conditions must include physical laws in addition to physical properties (see Kim 1998, pp. 19–25; Shoemaker 2007, p. 14 for discussion).
Ibid. Emergentism has thus sometimes been taken to involve the denial of functionalism about supervenient properties (Kim 1999). To say that functional properties cannot have causal powers beyond physical realizers is not to say that they cannot have powers. But it is because of the thin way in which functional properties are distinct from physical properties that recent defenses of “nonreductive” physicalism, seeking to secure a more robust sense in which mental properties are distinct from physical properties, have rejected the classic functionalist approach (see Pereboom 2011; Shoemaker 2007).
An outlook that appeals to analytic functionalism, and related ideas, has in some cases been advanced in conjunction with a supervenience-based definition of physicalism (Chalmers 1996; Jackson 1998). While the issues here are complex, I believe that it would be a mistake to think that this approach vindicates supervenience physicalism. Chalmers and Jackson contend that there is no middle ground between nomological necessity on one hand and conceptual or broadly logical necessity on the other; they thereby contend that metaphysical necessity is best simply identified with conceptual or broadly logical necessity. This provides a response to the emergentist objection, since an emergentist will want not to endorse the logical or conceptual supervenience of emergents on the physical way the world. But in this case, emergentism will be incompatible with the kind of metaphysical supervenience thesis that a supervenience physicalist insists upon. However, this response to the emergentism objection will not be available to any supervenience physicalist who does not follow Chalmers and Jackson in identifying the metaphysically possible with the conceptually or broadly logically possible. While a thorough discussion of this point is beyond the scope of this note, there very well may be a legitimate notion of metaphysical supervenience that does not correspond to conceptual or logical supervenience, given how Chalmers and Jackson understand these notions (Melnyk 2003; McLaughlin 2007a; Soames 2007). It is in part because of this that few have concluded from problems with supervenience definitions of physicalism that what is needed is the sort of conceptual or logical supervenience thesis defended by Chalmers and Jackson (Horgan 1993; Howell 2009; Melnyk 2003; Wilson 2005). Further, as Wilson (2005), pp. 450–453 argues, if we insist on conceptually necessary connections secured by a priori functional analyses, it would seem that we have replaced our supervenience-based definition with a realization thesis, what Wilson calls a thesis of “functional reduction”; and in this case, “it would be disingenuous to claim that this vindicates supervenience-based accounts of nothing over and aboveness” (Wilson 2005, p. 453).
A full appraisal of this outlook requires saying how, where a property M is individuated by a proper subset of the causal powers of a purely physical property P, M could itself be anything but purely physical (Morris 2011; Kim 2010 raises a related issue). McLaughlin (2007b) questions whether “subset realization” by physical properties supports necessitation by physical properties; for a response, see Shoemaker (2011).
Kim (2011); see fn. 11 and Morris (forthcoming) for further discussion.
Hill (2009) comes to a related conclusion, though he arrives at it in a different way—namely, by contending that “brute supervenience” is an objectionable metaphysical extravagance, that a defender of supervenience physicalism is thereby committed to giving an account of why supervenience relations obtain, and that the resources available here are precisely those at work in alternative physicalisms; the conclusion is that, as Heil (2011) remarks, there is no “pure” supervenience relation—at least insofar as we aim to use supervenience to characterize physicalism. I discuss the issue of brute supervenience, and its role in the emergentism objection, in Morris (unpublished).
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Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2012 meeting of the Alabama Philosophical Society. I would like to thank audience members for helpful comments and questions on that occasion. I would also like to thank Robert Howell and an anonymous referee at Erkenntnis for helpful feedback.
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Morris, K. Supervenience Physicalism, Emergentism, and the Polluted Supervenience Base. Erkenn 79, 351–365 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9497-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9497-5