Weak and global supervenience are strong

Abstract

Kim argues that weak and global supervenience are too weak to guarantee any sort of dependency. Of the three original forms of supervenience, strong, weak, and global, each commonly wielded across all branches of philosophy, two are thus cast aside as uninteresting or useless. His arguments, however, fail to appreciate the strength of weak and global supervenience. I investigate what weak and global supervenience relations are functionally and how they relate to strong supervenience. For a large class of properties, weak and global supervenience are equivalent to strong supervenience. I then offer a series of arguments showing that it is precisely because of their strength, not their weakness, that both weak and global supervenience are useless in characterizing any dependencies of interest to philosophers. Keywords Supervenience AE Anomalous monism Weak and global supervenience are uselessTo say that A properties supervene on B properties is merely to say that A properties are a function of B properties, or, more perspicuously, that which A properties a thing has is a function of which B properties it has. It is not to say that A properties depend on B properties, for A properties can be a function of B properties also in virtue of A being identical to B, in virtue of B depending on A, or in virtue of A and B both depending on C. 1 Nonetheless, even though supervenience is merely a functional relation and not a newly discovered type of dependency, as many once thought, a dependency relation of some kind, or, in the limiting case, an identity

Supervenience, Dependence, Disjunction

“…The P in play in this example is conspicuously an extrinsic property on any plausible way of drawing the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction, and given David Lewis's principle of recombination ( §1.8 of [Lewis, 1986]), this is an essential feature of such examples, as is pointed out in [Moyer, 2008], and provides, as Moyer notes, the missing link in Blackburn's 'mixed worlds' argument from (especially) p. 53 of [Blackburn, 1985]. This is the argument against the intelligibility of intra-world supervenience without inter-world supervenience (or any thing else which would require the truth of necessary implications from, in the case of special interest to Blackburn, non-moral to moral predication): if there are worlds where ∃x(N *x ∧ M x) is true and worlds where ∃x(N *x ∧ ¬M x) is true, where N * is a maximal non-moral property and M an arbitrary moral property, what explains the non-existence of ('mixed') worlds in which…”

“…76 Essentially the same example was later used on p. 130 of [Moyer, 2008], with one improvement  putting "people" for "things", thereby avoiding the mistake of thinking that the world comes with a determinate division into things  and one change in the opposite direction: forgetting that because of ties for height, being among the tallest in the sense just explained does not mean being the tallest. (Of course, the phrase "among the tallest" also has an everyday use in which it does not capture the intention of the example and introduces an unwanted vagueness, namely: the property of having as one's something at least close to a height not exceeded by Relatedly, [Hintikka, 1972] calls the contrast between (1) and (2) Leibniz's distinction and points out that the presence of relational vocabulary in the ϕ and ψ involved, the inference from (1) to (2) can fail, 77 remarking: Thus Leibniz's distinction is without difference as long as relational concepts are not employed.…”

“…(Note also that agreement in respect of the distribution of a property is not a bipartite equivalence relation like those considered in the discussion before Remark 1.7(i).) Several precisifications of this idea can be found in the literature, for example in [Kim, 1984b;Leuenberger, 2009;Shagrir, 2013;Steinberg, 2014]; see also [McLaughlin, 1995;Post, 1995;Stalnaker, 2003], and the discussions and further references provided by Bennett [2004]; Moyer [2008]; Paull and Sider [1992]; Williamson [2001]. An early study of some supervenience conditions (again not reviewed here) in the model theory of deontic logic can be found in [Rabinowicz, 1979], where, as in R. M. Hare's meta-ethical discussions (beginning with Hare [1952]), supervenience is very much an aspect of universalizability, the main subject of [Rabinowicz, 1979].…”

Physicalism and the Mind

“…The idea that the physical facts fix the mental facts entails that a world that physically duplicates the actual world has all the actual mental episodes, but this seems to allow that the world might also have some additional mental extras. Also see Moyer's (2008) appeal to an intuitively plausible "Recombination Principle" to argue that even weak (local) supervenience is equivalent to SS. Recall Horgan's point (quoted in 1.8) that while physicalists insist that immaterial mental substances do not in fact exist, they "need not deny that there are some possible 5 Relevant here is Kim's (1987, pp.…”

What is Hume’s Dictum, and Why Believe It?*

“…Beyond Hume’s original application to the case of causal connections, HD serves, for example, as ultimate reason to accept some combinatorial account of modality (Lewis 1986; Armstrong 1989), and to reject states of affairs (Lewis 1992) and necessitarian accounts of properties or laws (Armstrong 1983). Especially in its combinatorialist guise HD crops up as a crucial premise (see van Cleve 1990 and Kirk 1996 in defense of supervenience‐based formulations of physicalism, and Paull and Sider 1992, Bennett 2004, and Moyer 2008 on whether certain supervenience relations are equivalent). Reflecting this influence, HD’s bearing on various positions is now a philosophical topic in its own right (see Hawthorne et al 2006 on whether HD motivates “4‐dimensionalism” about persons, and Cameron 2006 on whether HD is compatible with tropes’ being non‐transferable).…”