The Myth of Supervenience

Abstract

Supervenience is often employed to indicate how one type of phenomenon is dependent upon or determined by another. I consider various forms of supervenience and attempt to show that this notion, even when taken in its strongest form, falls short of expressing a relation of genuine dependency. I then suggest what seems to be the most promising way to strengthen this notion so that it does have this effect, and then show that this emendation will not be adequate for all contexts.The concept of supervenience is often regarded as a savior of 20th century philosophy. When early efforts to reduce or analyze away the moral, the mental, or the macrophysical in favor of some more "genuine" type of reality repeatedly failed, supervenience was there to assist in the rescue. Moral properties, it was said, though not logically entailed by descriptive properties, supervene on these properties; mental events, though not identical with physical events, supervene on these events; and macrophysical objects, though not constituted by microphysical objects, supervene on these objects. In these cases the appeal to supervenience is taken to indicate how one domain of reality is dependent upon or determined by another in a way that does not compromise the logical or ontological autonomy of the two domains. And given this rather wide and diverse application of supervenience in matters of ontology, it might be suggested that the importance of supervenience for contemporary metaphysics rivals that of probability for contemporary physics. This assessment, however, would be a gross exaggeration, for as I will try to demonstrate this so-called savior effectively delivers far less than what it has seemed to promise.

The Unity of Grounding

“…Similar objections were offered by a number of authors in the 1980s and 1990s (Lombard 1986, §8.3;Grimes 1988;Kim 1990, §4). These sorts of problems eventually led Jaegwon Kim-probably the most prominent advocate of the philosophical importance of supervenience-to write the following:…”

Emergentism, Irreducibility, and Downward Causation

“…… property covariation alone, even in the form of 'strong asymmetric covariance', does not itself give us dependency; in that sense, dependency is an additional component of supervenience" (ib., 148); cf. also Grimes (1988). However, as I have just noted, dependency is not captured by the various proposals to deÞ ne supervenience.…”

Functionalism, superduperfunctionalism, and physicalism: lessons from supervenience

“…Some physicalists believe that explainability even trumps non-materiality, as illustrated by the acceptance of abstract objects in mathematics because they are allegedly indispensible to explanations in science (e.g., Quine 1976). Or again, some philosophers argue that the correlations of supervenience do not guarantee that all facts depend upon physical facts (Grimes 1988;Kim 1990Kim , 1993. Yet the difference between dependence and mere correlation arguably turns on the fact that the former is an explanatory relation whereas the latter is not.…”