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supervenience
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{{Short description|Relation between sets of properties or facts}}thumb|right|The upper levels on this chart can be considered to supervene on the lower levels.In philosophy, supervenience refers to a relation between sets of properties or sets of facts. X is said to supervene on Y if and only if some difference in Y is necessary for any difference in X to be possible.Examples of supervenience, in which case the truth values of some propositions cannot vary unless the truth values of some other propositions vary, include: - the content below is remote from Wikipedia
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- Whether there is a table in the living room supervenes on the positions of molecules in the living room.
- The truth value of (A) supervenes on the truth value of its negation, (¬A), and vice versa.
- Properties of individual molecules supervene on the properties of individual atoms.
- One's moral character supervenes on one's action(s).
History
Supervenience, which means literally "coming or occurring as something novel, additional, or unexpected",Horgan, Terry (1993) "From supervenience to superdupervenience: meeting the demands of a material world." Mind. 102: 555-86. from "super," meaning on, above, or additional, and "venire," meaning to come in Latin, shows occurrences in the Oxford English Dictionary dating back to 1844.Its systematic use in philosophy is considered to have begun in early 20th-century meta-ethics and emergentism. As G.E. Moore wrote in 1922,"The Conception of Intrinsic Value", in Philosophical Studies, New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., pp. 253-75. "if a given thing possesses any kind of intrinsic value in a certain degree, then... anything exactly like it, must, under all circumstances, possess it in exactly the same degree" (p. 261). This usage also carried over into the work of R. M. Hare. For discussion of the emergentist roots of supervenience see Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Supervenience.In the 1970s, Donald Davidson was the first to use the term to describe a broadly physicalist (and non-reductive) approach to the philosophy of mind, called anomalous monism. As he said in 1970, "supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respects, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respects without altering in some physical respects."Davidson, Donald (1970) "Mental Events." Reprinted in Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon PressIn subsequent years Terence ("Terry") Horgan, David Lewis, and especially Jaegwon Kim formalized the concept and began applying it to many issues in the philosophy of mind. This raised numerous questions about how various formulations relate to one another, how adequate the formulation is to various philosophical tasks (in particular, the task of formulating physicalism), and whether it avoids or entails reductionism.Definitions
In the contemporary literature, there are two primary (and non-equivalent) formulations of supervenience (for both definitions let A and B be sets of properties).{{Citation needed|reason=It refers to the literature but there is no single reference in this section |date=January 2018}}(1) A-properties supervene on B-properties if and only if all things that are B-indiscernible are A-indiscernible. Formally:- forall x forall y (forall X_{in B} (Xx leftrightarrow Xy) rightarrow forall Y_{in A} (Yx leftrightarrow Yy))
- forall x forall X_{in A} (Xx rightarrow exists Y_{in B} (Yx land forall y (Yy rightarrow Xy)))
Varieties of supervenience
Beginning in the 1980s, inspired largely by Jaegwon Kim's work, philosophers proposed many varieties of supervenience, which David Lewis called the "unlovely proliferation".Lewis, David (1986) On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. These varieties are based both on (1) and (2) above, but because (1) is more common we shall focus on varieties of supervenience based on it.We can begin by distinguishing between local and global supervenience:- Local: For any two objects x and y, if x and y are base-indiscernible, they are supervenient-indiscernible.
- Global: For any two worlds w1 and w2, if w1 and w2 are base-indiscernible, they are supervenient-indiscernible.
- Weak: For any world w, and for any two objects x in w and y in w, if x and y are base-indiscernible, they are supervenient-indiscernible.
- Strong: For any worlds w1 and w2, and for any two objects x in w1 and y in w2, if x and y are base-indiscernible, they are supervenient-indiscernible.
Examples of supervenient properties
Value properties
The value of a physical object to an (wiktionary:agent|agent) is sometimes held to be supervenient upon the physical properties of the object. In aesthetics, the beauty of La Grande Jatte might supervene on the physical composition of the painting (the specific molecules that make up the painting), the artistic composition of the painting (in this case, dots), the figures and forms of the painted image, or the painted canvas as a whole. In ethics, the goodness of an act of charity might supervene on the physical properties of the agent, the mental state of the agent (his or her intention), or the external state of affairs itself. Similarly, the overall suffering caused by an earthquake might supervene on the spatiotemporal entities that constituted it, the deaths it caused, or the natural disaster itself. The claim that moral properties are supervenient upon non-moral properties is called moral supervenience.Mental properties
In philosophy of mind, many philosophers make the general claim that the mental supervenes on the physical. In its most recent form this position derives from the work of Donald Davidson, although in more rudimentary forms it had been advanced earlier by others. The claim can be taken in several senses, perhaps most simply in the sense that the mental properties of a person are supervenient on their physical properties. Then:- If two persons are indistinguishable in all of their physical properties, they must also be indistinguishable in all of their mental properties.
Computational properties
There are several examples of supervenience to be found in computer networking. For example, in a dial-up internet connection, the audio signal on a phone line transports IP packets between the user's computer and the Internet service provider's computer. In this case, the arrangement of bytes in that packet supervenes on the physical properties of the phone signal. More generally, each layer of the OSI Model of computer networking supervenes on the layers below it.We can find supervenience wherever a message is conveyed by a representational medium. When we see a letter "a" in a page of print, for example, the meaning Latin lowercase "a" supervenes on the geometry of the boundary of the printed glyph, which in turn supervenes on the ink deposition on the paper.Biological properties
In biological systems phenotype can be said to supervene on genotype.JOURNAL, Mitchell, Valone, W.A., T.J., 1990, The Optimization Research Program: Studying Adaptations by Their Function, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 65, 43â52, 10.1086/416584, 1, 84451535, This is because any genotype encodes a finite set of unique phenotypes, but any given phenotype is not produced by a finite set of genotypes. Innumerable examples of convergent evolution can be used to support this claim. Throughout nature, convergent evolution produces incredibly similar phenotypes from a diverse set of taxa with fundamentally different genotypes underpinning the phenotypes. One example is evolution on islands which is a remarkably predictable example of convergent evolution where the same phenotypes consistently evolve for the same reasons.JOURNAL, Foster, J.B., 1964, The evolution of mammals on islands, Nature, 202, 234â235, 10.1038/202234a0, 1964Natur.202..234F, 4929, 7870628, Organisms released from predation tend to become larger, while organisms limited by food tend to become smaller. Yet there are almost infinite numbers of genetic changes that might lead to changes in body size.JOURNAL, Fisher, R.A., 1918, The correlation between relatives on the supposition of Mendelian inheritance, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 52, 2, 399â433, 10.1017/S0080456800012163, 181213898,weblink JOURNAL, Kemper, K.E., Visscher, P.M., Gooddard, M.E., 2012, Genetic architecture of body size in mammals, Genome Biol., 13, 244, 10.1186/gb-2012-13-4-244, 4, 22546202, 3446298, free, Another example of convergent evolution is the loss of sight that almost universally occurs in cave fish living in lightless pools.JOURNAL, Gatenby R.A., Gillies R.J, Brown J.S., amp, 2011, Of cancer and cave fish, Nature Reviews Cancer, 11, 237â238, 10.1038/nrc3036, 3971416, 4, 21548400, Eyes are expensive, and in lightless cave pools there is little reason for fish to have eyes. Yet, despite the remarkably consistent convergent evolution producing sightless cave fish, the genetics that produce the loss of sight phenotype is different nearly every time. This is because phenotype supervenes on genotype.Arguments against supervenience-based formulations of physicalism
Although supervenience seems to be perfectly suited to explain the predictions of physicalism (i.e. the mental is dependent on the physical), there are four main problems with it. They are Epiphenomenal ectoplasm, the lone ammonium molecule problem, modal status problem and the problem of necessary beings.Epiphenomenal ectoplasm
Epiphenomenal ectoplasm was proposed by Horgan and Lewis in 1983{{Citation needed|date=June 2020}}; they envisioned a possible world (a world that could possibly exist) W which is identical to our world in the distribution of all mental and physical characteristics (i.e. they are identical), except world W contains an experience called epiphenomenal ectoplasm that does not causally interact with that world. The possibility of such a world should be compatible with physicalism as this is a property of the actual world; but a supervenience-based definition of physicalism would imply that such a world could not exist, because it differs from the actual world with respect to a mental property, but is physically identical.A typical response to this objection is Frank Jackson's;BOOK, From Metaphysics to Ethics, Jackson, F., Oxford University Press, 1998, Oxford, he adjusted the supervenience-based definition of physicalism to state "Physicalism is true at a possible world W if and only if any world which is a minimal physical duplicate (i.e. is physically identical) of W is a duplicate of W simpliciter." This avoids the problem because the "ectoplasm" world is not a minimal physical duplicate, so its identity with the actual world need not follow.The lone ammonium molecule problem
The lone ammonium molecule problem provides a problem for Jackson's solution to epiphenomenal ectoplasm. It was proposed by Jaegwon Kim in 1993 when he stated that according to Jackson's idea of supervenience, a possible world W was identical to the actual world, except it possessed an extra ammonium molecule on one of Saturn's rings. This may not seem to provide much of a problem, but because Jackson's solution refers only to minimal physical duplicates, this allows for the mental properties of W to be vastly different from those in the actual world. If such a difference would cause mental differences on Earth, it would not be consistent with our understanding of physicalism.{{citation needed|date=January 2018}}Modal status
Suppose that the supervenience thesis for physicalism is stated as a nomological constraint, rather than a metaphysical one; this avoids any objection based on the thesis ruling out metaphysical possibilities which a physicalist would leave open. But the thesis would not rule out the metaphysical possibility of philosophical zombies, although their impossibility is a clear consequence of physicalism.BOOK, Chalmers, David, The Conscious Mind, 1996, Oxford University Press, New York,Problem of necessary beings
The problem of necessary beings was proposed by Jackson in 1998, in which he stated that the existence of a non-physical necessary being (in all possible worlds) would prove physicalism false. However, physicalism allows for the existence of necessary beings, because any minimal physical duplicate would have the same necessary being as the actual world. This however is paradoxical, based on the fact that physicalism both permits and prevents the existence of such beings.See also
Notes
{{Reflist}}External links
- SEP, supervenience, Supervenience,
- IEP, superven, Supervenience and Determination,
- IEP, supermin, Supervenience and Mind,
- {{PhilPapers|category|humean-supervenience|Humean supervenience}}
- {{InPho|taxonomy|2213}}
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