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Concepts of Supervenience Revisited

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. See Shagrir (2002); for earlier versions of this claim that refer to global supervenience, see Kim (1987) and Petrie (1987).

  2. See Sider (1999).

  3. Horgan also introduces the notion of regional supervenience, and distinguishes between strong and weak versions of this notion (see also Horgan 1993: 570–572).

  4. Alternatively, one can think of the equation as a description of the relations between P and Q in all possible worlds.

  5. Here is Kim's (1987) version: A-properties strongly individually supervene on B-properties if and only if for any possible worlds w i and w j and any objects x in w i and y in w j, if x in w i is B-indiscernible from y in w j, then x in w i is A-indiscernible from y in w j.

  6. Here is Kim's (1987) version: A-properties weakly individually supervene on B-properties if and only if for any possible world w and any objects x and y in w, if x and y are B-indiscernible in w, then they are A-indiscernible in w.

  7. Bennett assumes an “isolation principle” introduced in Paull and Sider (1992); I also appeal to this principle below. Moyer (2008) assumes a recombination principle that, roughly, adds on to the isolation principle the possibility of making up worlds from isolated parts of other worlds.

  8. See Gibbard (1975).

  9. This objection was raised by Mark Moyer (private communication).

  10. More recently, Sider (2008) concedes that the supervenience of the modal on the non-modal should be of the strong global variety, and he advances a different reply on behalf of coincidentalism. Roughly, he suggests that there is a basic modal relation of Goliath and Lumpl of opposite-possibly surviving being squashed, meaning that exactly one might have survived being squashed.

  11. But see Donato and Polanski (2006), who challenge some premises of the proofs.

  12. Another concern stems from Kim’s argument that no notion of supervenience establishes dependence, since supervenience “merely states a pattern of property covariation” (1998: 10)”, and “property covariation per se is metaphysically neutral” (Kim 1990: 16). Thus supervenience “leaves open the question of what grounds or accounts for it–that is, why the supervenience relation obtains” (1998: 9). Kim's point is well taken: by "establish" we should not mean that supervenience is a dependence relation, only that it reflects a dependence relation; see Shagrir (2009a).

  13. The classic papers that defend externalism are Putnam (1975) and Burge (1979).

  14. Hoffmann and Newen raise a similar claim concerning SIS and maximal B-properties; I focus on their argument against SGS, but similar considerations apply to SIS.

  15. By taking into account more B-properties you strengthen the requirement on B-isomorphism. But since this requirement is the antecedent of the supervenience conditional, it weakens the criterion on supervenience: e.g., supervenience is satisfied (vacuously) whenever there is no B-isomorphism.

  16. This point was made by Paull and Sider (1992) in their reply to Petrie (1987); see also Bennett and McLaughlin (2005).

  17. This adjustment makes Hoffmann and Newen's story similar to Kim's wayward atom story (1989: 41), which meant to show that global supervenience is too weak to establish dependence. My reply to Hoffmann and Newen is along the lines of Paull and Sider's reply to Kim (1992: pp. 841–847).

  18. I adopt here Paull and Sider's isolation principle and other ideas of mereology.

  19. FPP stands for “finest partition principle”.

  20. Leuenberger indeed concluded that there is tension in the philosophical concept of global supervenience.

  21. See, e.g., Davidson (1987): "What I take Burge’s and Putnam’s imagined cases to show (and what I think the Swampman example shows more directly) is that people who are in all relevant physical respects similar (or ‘identical’ in the necktie sense) can differ in what they mean or think… But of course there is something different about them, even in the physical world; their causal histories are different" (p. 452).

  22. Elsewhere (Shagrir 2009b), I consider other conversions to relations; these are far less effective than the conversion to maximal properties.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Vera Hoffmann, and to two anonymous referees of this Journal. This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation, Grant 725/08.

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  1. Philosophy and Cognitive Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Oron Shagrir

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Shagrir, O. Concepts of Supervenience Revisited. Erkenn 78, 469–485 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-012-9410-7

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