Supervenience: its Logic and its Inferential Role in Classical Genetics
Abstract
Supervenience is mostly conceived of as a purely philosophical concept.
Nevertheless, I will argue, it played an important and very
fruitful inferential role in classical genetics. Gregor Mendel assumed
that phenotypic traits supervene on underlying factors, and
this assumption allowed him to successfully predict and explain the
phenotypical regularities he had experimentally discovered. Therefore
it is interesting to explicate how we reason about supervenience
relations.
I will tackle the following two questions. Firstly, can a reliable
method (a logic) be found for infenfog supervenience claims from
data? Secondly, can a reliable method (a logic) be found to empirically
test supervenience claims? I will answer these questions
within the framework of the adaptive logics programme.