Can a certain sort of property supervene on another sort of property without reducing to it? Many philosophers find the superveniencel irreducibility combination attractive in the philosophy of mind and in moral philosophy (Davidson 1980 and Moore 1903). They think that mental properties supervene upon physical properties but do not reduce to them, or that moral properties supervene upon natural properties without reducing to them. Other philosophers have tried to show that the combination is ultimately untenable, however attractive it might (...) initially appear. Thus Ted Honderich and Jaegwon Kim argue that the combination cannot explain the causal efhcacy of the supervening properties (Honderich 1982, Kim 1984b). And Simon.. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to show that claims of supervenience of the mental upon the physical do not define substantial forms of materialism. While weak supervenience holds trivially, even strong supervenience does not justify a claim of identity, dependence or determination; it is only a relation between classifications of persons by psychological and physical properties.

In 1971, Simon Blackburn worked out an argument against moral realism appealing to the supervenience of the moral realm on the natural realm.1 He has since revised the argument, in part to take account of objections,2 but the basic structure remains intact. While commentators3 seem to agree that the argument is not successful, they have not agreed upon what goes wrong. I believe this is because no attempt has been made to see what happens when Blackburn's argument is addressed to (...) particular varieties of moral realism. As I see it, we must look to these various brands if we want to understand just where the concept of supervenience can be usefully employed. (shrink)

Discussion of the supervenience relation in the philosophical literature of recent years has become Byzantine in its intricacy and diversity. Subtle modulations of the basic concept have been tooled and retooled with increasing frequency, until supervenience has lost nearly all its original lustre as a simple and powerful tool for cracking open refractory philosophical problems. I present a conceptual model of the supervenience relation that captures all the important extant concepts without ignoring the complexities uncovered during work over the past (...) two decades. I test my analysis by applying it to the problem of defining physicalism, concluding that the thesis of physicalism is best captured by the conjunction of two supervenience relations. (shrink)

Recently, several philosophers have argued that nonreductive physicalism is a false, unstable, and incoherent position. I argue that the position these critics are attacking is a straw one. To help explain why let us distinguish three issues about which nonreductive physicalists might plausibly be thought to have an opinion: ontological considerations about the types of things that exist at a world, issues involving the existence and nature of any dependency relationships between the types of things that exist at a world, (...) and epistemological questions regarding the best way to describe, explain, or characterize the types of things that exist at a world. I argue that reductive and nonreductive physicalists essentially agree with respect to the first two issues, but disagree with respect to the last issue. Nonreductive physicalists advocate a position that is ontologically or metaphysically reductive, but epistemologically or representationally nonreductive. Although this position could prove false on empirical grounds, it is neither unstable nor incoherent. (shrink)