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...

Abstract The concept of metaphysical grounding refers to a dependence relation—a relation between facts that is asymmetrical and non-causal. I aim apply this Divine Command Theory (DCT) moral obligations. command theorists say obligations arise from God’s commands. argue the three main views on divine obligation—causal, supervenience, identity—do not capture all we desire in theory After attemp...

Supervenience is a concept borrowed from moral philosophy by philosophy of mind to solve the mind-body problem. The mind-body problem is actually a set of problems, among which the major ones are the Consciousness problem (Illustrative instance: how can physical states have felt qualities?) and the Intentionality Problem (Illustrative instance: How can physical states be about something, or be ...

We view sorites in terms of stimuli acting upon a system and evoking this system’s responses. Supervenience of responses on stimuli implies that they either lack tolerance (i.e., they change in every vicinity of some of the stimuli), or stimuli are not always connectable by finite chains of stimuli in which successive members are ‘very similar’. If supervenience does not hold, the properties of...

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 ...

This is one of two papers about emergence, reduction and supervenience. It expounds these notions and analyses the general relations between them. The companion paper analyses the situation in physics, especially limiting relations between physical theories. I shall take emergence as behaviour that is novel and robust relative to some comparison class. I shall take reduction as deduction using ...

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. 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 eVect...