No abstract

No abstract

It has recently been made clear that the standard formulations of the supervenience relation -weak, global and strong, among others -are too programmatic to be the full answer to a physicalist's prayers. 1 All the standard formulations present the supervenience of one set of properties on another in terms of property correlations, without placing any constraints on the dependency relation effecting these correlations. It turns out that such abstract characterizations do not ensure that properties supervening upon (what are assumed to be) physicalistically acceptable base properties are themselves physicalistically acceptable. Most disastrously, the standard formulations of supervenience turn out one and all to permit supervenient properties to be emergent in a way at odds with materialism. What physicalism needs to support a materialist metaphysics is 'superdupervenience'supervenience that guarantees that supervenient properties are 'nothing over and above' their physicalistically acceptable base properties. Terence Horgan (p. ) has suggested that the following constraint will do the job:Horgan's constraint. Any genuinely physicalist metaphysics should countenance ontological inter-level supervenience relations only if they are robustly explainable in a physicalistically acceptable way.He uses the qualifiers 'ontological' and 'robustly explainable' to stop the explanation from showing (albeit in a physicalistically acceptable way) that the supervenience relation reflects a merely conceptual or semantic constraint on a given domain of discourse: 'supervenience is ontological if it is

The many and varied formulations of physicalism instantiate the following schema:Physicalism: All entities are nothing over and above physical entities.Filling in the schema requires specifying what it is for an entity to be physical, and what it is for an entity to be ''nothing over and above'' some other entities. 1 Some have worried that no account of the physical is adequate for physicalist purposes; and I'll soon say a bit about how physicalists have responded (in my view, successfully) to this worry. But my main focus here is on nothing over and aboveness, and specifically on whether any supervenience-based approaches to characterizing this notion can enter into viably formulating physicalism.Supervenience-based accounts of nothing over and aboveness also instantiate a schema:Supervenience-based Nothing Over and Aboveness: The A-entities are nothing over and above the B-entities if the A-entities supervene on the B-entities. 2The four main ways of filling in the schema correspond to different ways of characterizing the modal strength, the supervenience base, and the supervenience connection at issue. For each such approach, I'll argue that a physicalism based on the associated account of nothing over and aboveness is compatible with physicalism's best traditional rival: a naturalist emergentism. Others have argued that supervenience-based formulations of # 2005 Blackwell Publishing Inc.,

Many phenomena appear to be indeterminate, including material macro-object boundaries and certain open future claims. Here I provide an account of indeterminacy in metaphysical, rather than semantic or epistemic, terms. Previous accounts of metaphysical indeterminacy (MI) have typically taken this to involve its being indeterminate which of various determinate (precise) states of affairs obtain. On my alternative account, MI involves its being determinate (or just plain true) that an indeterminate (imprecise) state of affairs obtains. I more specifically suggest that MI involves an object's (i) having a determinable property, but (ii) not having any unique determinate of that determinable. I motivate the needed extension of the traditional understanding of determinables, then argue that a determinable-based account of MI accommodates, in illuminating fashion, both 'glutty' and 'gappy' cases of MI, while satisfactorily treating concerns about MI stemming from Evans' argument and the problem of the many.