Anti-Reductionism and Supervenience

Why Gliders Don't Exist: Anti-reductionism and Emergence Pragmatic Anti-reductionism

ALife has always been centrally concerned with the nature and origins of emergent phenomena and their anti-reductionist implications for our understanding of complex systems. I argue that the traditional approach to understanding emergent phenomena in physical systems is still fundamentally reductionist, and outline an anti-reductionist alternative. Contemporary debate about emergence can only ...

Supervenience and Infinitary Logic

The discussion of supervenience is replete with the use of infinitary logical operations. For instance, one may often find a supervenient property that corresponds to an infinite collection of supervenience-base properties, and then ask about the infinite disjunction of all those base properties. This is crucial to a well-known argument of Kim (1984) that supervenience comes nearer to reduction...

Supervenience and neuroscience

The philosophical technical term “supervenience” is frequently used in the philosophy of mind as a concise way of characterizing the core idea of physicalism in a manner that is neutral with respect to debates between reductive physicalists and nonreductive physicalists. I argue against this alleged neutrality and side with reductive physicalists. I am especially interested here in debates betw...

Supervenience and Co-location

Co-location is compatible with the doctrine of microphysical supervenience. Microphysical supervenience involves intrinsic qualitative properties that supervene on microphysical structures. Two different objects, such as Socrates and the lump of tissue of which he is constituted, can be co-located objects that supervene on different sets of properties. Some of the properties are shared, but oth...

Individualism and Supervenience