Supervenience and Psycho-Physical Dependence

Global Supervenience and Dependence 1

Two versions of global supervenience have recently been distinguished from each other. I introduce a third version, which is more likely what people had in mind all along. However, I argue that one of the three versions is equivalent to strong supervenience in every sense that matters, and that neither of the other two versions counts as a genuine determination relation. I conclude that global ...

Supervenience and Implementation: Virtual and Physical Machines

How can a virtual machine X be implemented in a physical machine Y? We know the answer as far as compilers , editors, theorem-provers, operating systems are concerned , at least insofar as we know how to produce these implemented virtual machines, and no mysteries are involved. This paper is about extrapolating from that knowledge to the implementation of minds in brains. By linking the philoso...

Physicalism, Supervenience, and Dependence: A Reply to Campbell

1. In a recent article in this journal, Neil Campbell has argued that certain problems with the doctrine of psycho-physical supervenience can be overcome if supervenience is viewed as a relation between predicates rather than as a relation between properties. Campbell suggests that, when properly understood, this predicate version of supervenience "expresses a form of psycho-physical dependence...

[sports and Their Psycho-physical Aspects].

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...