Cheshire Cat supervenience

Journal of Value Inquiry 27 (3-4):417-430 (1993)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Supervenience therefore is a concept with little to offer. It lacks conceptual clarity and is unable to explain the dependency relation without relying on it too heavily. Its mechanism of operation is unclear unless a projectivist analysis is used, but serious problems remain with such an account, and, even if it does apply to aesthetic or moral properties, and even secondary properties, we cannot see how it might apply to the chemical and physical world and to the mind/brain problem. Whatever characteristics make it plausible in one realm debar it from the other, and even if it is restricted to the ethical realm we cannot see how supervenience applies to our prudential values, the basic attitudes that orient our moral and aesthetic outlook.This is the second aspect to the “Cheshire Catness” of supervenience; the harder you look at it the more insubstantial it becomes. It fades away into the background, leaving just its smile. But, like any smile, there is more gap than substance, and “supervenience” does nothing to fill that gap. Still the smile lingers, the haunting question of the connection between natural and moral-aesthetic properties. This is an important question and needs to be addressed, but supervenience does not address it. It merely labels it, and, by labelling it confers a spurious air of lucidity without shedding any but the most fractured light

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 97,335

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Analytics

Added to PP
2013-01-22

Downloads
47 (#367,844)

6 months
10 (#567,741)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Concepts of supervenience.Jaegwon Kim - 1984 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45 (December):153-76.
The myth of supervenience.Thomas R. Grimes - 1988 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 69 (June):152-60.
Supervenience and moral dependence.Michael R. Depaul - 1987 - Philosophical Studies 51 (3):425 - 439.
Moral epistemology and the supervenience of ethical concepts.Robert Audi - 1991 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 29 (S1):1-24.

Add more references