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Topic: Supervenience

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	20th WCP: Reviving Psychophysical Supervenience
		Supervenience was thought to capture the idea of dependence without reduction and thus promised to provide a useful framework for discussions of mental causation, phenomenal experience, and, more generally, the relation between the mental and the physical.
		Hence, when we think of supervenience as relating predicates, and when we consider the relation that holds between mental and physical predicates in radical interpretation, it is clear that mental predicates depend logically on physical predicates.
		Given that Davidson later on formulated supervenience in terms of a relation between predicates, and given that this is consistent with his earlier definition in "Mental Events," I see no reason to think that the form of psychophysical dependence I have described is different from the one Davidson’s supervenience is supposed to capture.
	www.bu.edu /wcp/Papers/Mind/MindCamp.htm (2391 words)

	Supervenience - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Importantly, the reverse does not follow (supervenience is not symmetric): even if being the same physically entails being the same psychologically, two persons can be the same psychologically yet different physically: that is, psychological properties are multiply realized in physical properties.
		Finally, supervenience claims typically involve some modal force, however, the way that modal force is specified depends on which more specific variety of supervenience one decides upon (see below).
		The philosophical belief that mental and physical events exist at a series of durationless moments that lie between the physical past and the physical future is known as presentism, and is a form of belief in Galilean relativity.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Supervenience (2563 words)

	HYLE 5-2 (1999): Molecular Models and the Question of Physicalism
		Roughly, a group of properties, A (the supervenient group), supervenes on another, B (the subvenient, or base group) when there cannot be variation in respect of A without variation in respect of B. Supervenience does seem a plausible determination relation in that it shows how the A-properties are fixed along with the B-properties.
		Hence supervenience offers something parallel to the explanatory commitment in reductionism: although we may not have physical explanations of higher-level regularities, we do have an assurance that the causal processes that constitute the basis of higher level explanations are, in fact, physical processes.
		Supervenience physicalism and its basis in the completeness of physics are taken to be unproblematic, and the argument is about whether or not to go further.
	www.hyle.org /journal/issues/5/hendry.htm (7178 words)

	Weak supervenience 6 19 02
		According to Kim, the supervenient relation of dependency is really a “relation between families of properties” (55) of which respectively each the base and realm of the supervenient consists.
		And it is dubious whether strong supervenience is flexible enough in order to assure a proper working and explanation in the area of of moral deliberation and in the area of deliberation supporting action.
		Because weak supervenience allows for naturalism (no change in supervenient properties without the change in the subvenient basis); but weak supervenience also allows for weird behavior: just a small change in subvenient properties may have as the consequence complete reversal of supervenient (evaluative, moral) properties.
	www2.arnes.si /~supmpotr/Weak.htm (5910 words)

	Sense and Supervenience
		By contrast, non-individualist supervenience, such as "global" supervenience, remains unscathed, a possibility overlooked by Lynne Baker, as is clear from a physicalist account of sense in the case of non-human biological adaptations that are for producing things about affairs in the world.
		Many physicalists have endorsed some such thesis of supervenient determination, typically in response to what is widely seen as the failure of property-property reductivism, according to which all genuine properties whatever are identical or at least equivalent to some compound of purely physical properties.
		The thought has been that a supervenient determination thesis, perhaps along the lines of (1), can escape the counter-examples that afflict reductivism, thereby preserving the physicalist's characteristic claim that all a thing's properties are determined ultimately by physical affairs.
	www.vanderbilt.edu /~postjf/sensup.htm (6201 words)

	Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind - supervenience
		Such supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respect, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respect without altering in some physical respect.
		An example of supervenience is given in the relations between the acceleration, velocity, and position of an object in space.
		Another important feature of supervenience illustrated by this example is that the supervening properties need not be identical to the properties upon which they supervene.
	philosophy.uwaterloo.ca /MindDict/supervenience.html (474 words)

	Supervenience and Determination [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
		Supervenience is not intended to be a contingent "matter of actual fact" claim concerning two sets of properties that happen to be correlated at some particular time or place.
		Davidson uses this supervenience relation to defend a non-reductive, but nonetheless non-dualist, position with regard to the way in which the mental stands to the physical (that is, psychophysical supervenience).
		Strong supervenience holds at any world (again, given restrictions on the allowable worlds), and once a world is selected it follows that at any world accessible from that world, objects in the initially selected and the accessed world that are B-duplicates, will be A-duplicates—hence, one can compare cross-world cases.
	www.iep.utm.edu /s/superven.htm (6236 words)

	Triablogue: The Covenience of Supervenience
		Supervenience begins with a simple motto: "No difference without a physical difference." Supervenience, however, is not a crass form of physicalism.
		Since supervenience is a transitive relation, and since human neuro-physiology in turn supervenes on human molecular biology which in turn supervenes on human atomic physics which in turn supervenes on human elementary particle physics, it follows that human intelligence supervenes on the underlying fundamental physics.
		The intellect plays a distinguished role in any supervenience account, and it is not clear that it is legitimate to turn it on itself and thereby proclaim that the very instrument we need to establish supervenience itself supervenes.
	triablogue.blogspot.com /2006/11/covenience-of-supervenience.html (17720 words)

	Philosophy of Mind Bibliography, Part 3: Metaphysics of Mind
		Supervenience of the mental on the physical is what is required to make mental causation possible.
		A nonreductive supervenience hypothesis: supervenient properties are properties of properties, e.g intrinsic goodness is a property of an object's nature.
		Supervenience doesn't entail reducibility, as necessary coextension doesn't suffice, and is incompatible with reducibility, due to ontological asymmetry.
	consc.net /biblio/3.html (3003 words)

	Hartmann and the Modern Concpet of Supervenience
		Such supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respect”.
		When Davidson began to talk about supervenience, as in the quotations above, he referred to material and mental events in a quite straightforward way, but later on he said that his notion of supervenience ”is best thought of as a relation between a predicate and a set of predicates”.
		In triple-modal property supervenience, the elements in the sets S and B belong to different ontological levels, and the covariation component represents a requirement that there is also a more determinate inter-strata connection between them.
	hem.passagen.se /ijohansson/Superveniens2.htm (7544 words)

	A Note on Armstrong’s and Lewis’ Concepts of Supervenience
		Secondly, he required that the supervenient entity should not be entailed by the base entities.
		Both Lewis himself and Preyer and Siebelt give their readers the impression that Lewis is using a quite ordinary concept of a supervenience relation, but that he puts restrictions on what kind of base entities that are allowed to enter the relation.
		Supervenience is announced to be forthcoming on Ashgate in 2002.
	hem.passagen.se /ijohansson/Superveniens3.htm (1594 words)

	Supervenience (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
		Supervenience is not a relation of ontological priority; the supervenience of A on B does not guarantee that B-properties are ontologically prior to A-properties.
		Thus, for example, global supervenience is useful if there can be distinct but spatio-temporally coincident objects—it leaves room to say that the properties of a clay statue supervene upon the properties of the distinct lump of clay that constitutes it (see Section 5.5).
		The upshot is that although a global supervenience thesis fails to entail either a weak or strong supervenience thesis in virtue of logical form, it might nevertheless be the case that plausible metaphysical principles entail that whenever the former holds, so does the latter.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/supervenience (14247 words)

	Reductionism, antireductionism, and supervenience
		Supervenience was originally designed to save that which is noncausal, nonreductive physicalism from the aftereffects of the multiple realization argument.
		Supervenience is a relation that holds between natural groupings or what Kim called families of properties.
		The existence of a supervenience relation between property family A and property family B suggests that there is a determinative priority between the two families of properties; but it does not indicate the specific nature of that determinative relationship (is it mereological, causal, semantic, or some other kind of determination?).
	www.drury.edu /ess/philsci/KleeCh5.html (2770 words)

	Physicalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Superveniences establishes such a relationship between the mental and the physical, so that any change in the mental is caused by a change in the physical.
		Another description of supervenience does away with levels altogether and rather pictures reality as a matrix or mosaic, upon which we imply different patterns (the old levels) but emphasising that all patterns are variations of the same implicit reality.
		However, supervenience alone is not sufficient to establish the basis of physicalism.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Physicalism (3473 words)

	6-46 Rejecting supervenience is unacceptable. (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-19)
		Rejection of supervenience (the doctrine that identical physical activity gives rise to identical conscious states) leads to the unacceptable consequence that a "brain-o-scope" could reveal identical neuronal activity (down to the last atom) associated with 2 different mental states.
		Rejecting supervenience leads to the unacceptable consequence that a person whose "brain-o-scope" reveals identical neuronal activity (down to the last atom) might have two different mental states.
		I admit to a great degree of mystification about the connection between mind and body, but I see no reason to endorse such possibilities that directly contradict all that we do know about brain process and experience" (T. Maudlin, 1989, p.
	www.macrovu.com /CCT6/CCTMap646.html (372 words)

	Supervenience, Causality, Mind and Action
		The program will consist of a series of papers falling under the general theme of "Supervenience, Causality, Action and Mind": this encompasses four inter-related focal issues which together characterize much of the work of Davidson, Dretske and Kim.
		There will be a formal response to each paper; these are meant to be more adventurous than simple "comments".
		The organizers have not in all cases received final titles for the papers, and there is still some fluidity in the planning.
	www.hi.is /~mike/Aix.html (587 words)

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