Abstract
In this paper I pour a little cold
water on claims of global supervenience, not by arguing that they are
false, and not by arguing that they possess no philosophical utility
whatsoever, but by building a case for the following conditional
conclusion: if you expect claims of global supervenience to play a
certain role in a certain metaphysical project, then you will be disappointed, since they cannot play such a
role. The metaphysical project is to give an
illuminating and suitably physicalist account of the relations
between properties instantiated at different levels of reality. The paper makes a prima facie case for holding that claims of global supervenience can provide no illumination in such an account, a
case that emerges when the metaphysics of global supervenience
is probed a little more deeply than is customary.