How superduper does a physicalist supervenience need to be?
Philosophical Quarterly 49 (194):33-52 (1999)
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| Abstract |
Note: this is the first published presentation and defense of the 'proper subset strategy' for making sense of non-reductive physicalism or the associated notion of realization; this is sometimes, inaccurately, called "Shoemaker's subset strategy"; if people could either call it the 'subset strategy' or better yet, add my name to the mix I would appreciate it. Horgan claims that physicalism requires "superdupervenience" -- supervenience plus robust ontological explanation of the supervenient in terms of the base properties. I argue that Horgan's account fails to rule out physically unacceptable emergence. I rather suggest that this and other unacceptable possibilities may be ruled out by requiring that each individual causal power in the set associated with a given supervenient property be numerically identical with a causal power in the set associated with its base property. I go on to show that a wide variety of physicalist accounts, both reductive and non-reductive, are implicitly or explicitly designed to meet this condition, and so are more similar than they seem. In particular, non-reductive physicalism accounts typically appeal to a relation plausibly ensuring that the powers of a higher-level property are a proper subset of those of its physical base property.
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| Keywords | proper subset strategy subset account of realization mental causation non-reductive physicalism supervenience mental causation Kim, J realization subset of powers powers-based realization |
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| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9213.00127 |
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Determination, Realization and Mental Causation.Jessica M. Wilson - 2009 - Philosophical Studies 145 (1):149-169.
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