David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Jack Alan Reynolds
Learn more about PhilPapers
This article argues that weak supervenience is sufficiently strong to establish a reasonable and plausible materialism. Supervenience is a relation between families of properties, Such that, Roughly speaking, Family a supervenes on family b if any objects which are indiscernible with respect to b are thereby indiscernible with respect to a. Weak supervenience is supervenience restricted to one possible world; strong supervenience is a "necessary" supervenience extending across some principled set of possible worlds. These notions are made somewhat more rigorous following jaegwon kim's development of them. Kim has argued that only strong supervenience can ground a 'robust' materialism, So the article begins by criticizing his arguments for this position. It argues that any form of strong supervenience is in fact too strong to characterize materialism as it is normally conceived, For materialism is neither logically nor physically necessary. But the day is saved as weak supervenience can be shown to be just sufficiently strong to ground materialism. In particular, It is shown that supervenience can support counterfactuals without requiring any notion of "necessary" supervenience
|Keywords||Logic Materialism Metaphysics Reductionism Supervenience Kim, J|
|Categories||categorize this paper)|
|Buy the book||$17.32 used (73% off) $763.83 new Amazon page|
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server
Configure custom proxy (use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy)
|Through your library|
References found in this work BETA
No references found.
Citations of this work BETA
No citations found.
Similar books and articles
R. Cranston Paull & Theodore Sider (1992). In Defense of Global Supervenience. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (4):833-53.
William E. Seager (1988). Weak Supervenience and Materialism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 48 (June):697-709.
David J. Chalmers (1996). Supervenience and Materialism. In The Conscious Mind. Oxford University Press. 697-709.
Terence E. Horgan (1993). From Supervenience to Superdupervenience: Meeting the Demands of a Material World. Mind 102 (408):555-86.
Jaegwon Kim (1987). 'Strong' and 'Global' Supervenience Revisited. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 48 (December):315-26.
Anthony I. Jack (1994). Materialism and Supervenience. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 72 (4):426-43.
Franz von Kutschera (1992). Supervenience and Reductionism. Erkenntnis 36 (3):333-343.
John Haugeland (1984). Ontological Supervenience. Southern Journal of Philosophy Supplement 22 (S1):1-12.
Paul R. Teller (1984). The Poor Man's Guide to Supervenience and Determination. Southern Journal of Philosophy Supplement 22 (S1):137-62.
Paul K. Moser (1992). Physicalism and Global Supervenience. Southern Journal of Philosophy 30 (1):71-82.
Added to index2009-01-28
Total downloads6 ( #224,056 of 1,413,285 )
Recent downloads (6 months)3 ( #67,681 of 1,413,285 )
How can I increase my downloads?