Essay about Reviving Psychophysical Supervenience

Reviving Psychophysical Supervenience ABSTRACT: Many philosophers have lost their enthusiasm for the concept of supervenience in the philosophy of mind. This is largely due to the fact that, as Jaegwon Kim has shown, familiar versions of supervenience describe relations of mere property covariation without capturing the idea of dependence. Since the dependence of the mental on the physical is a necessary requirement for even the weakest version of physicalism, it would seem that existing forms of supervenience cannot achieve that for which they were designed. My aim is to revive the concept of supervenience. I argue that if we construe supervenience along Davidsonian lines — as a relation connecting predicates rather than properties —†¦show more content†¦In light of this, many have lost their enthusiasm for this idea. My goal in this paper is to renew our faith in supervenience. To do so, however, will not require the development of a new formulation of the concept; instead, it involves clearing up some misconceptions about an existing version of this relation. I refer to Davidson’s original treatment of supervenience. Most have assumed that Davidson’s brand of supervenience is equivalent to Kim’s weak supervenience, which is too weak to express dependence. I will argue that Davidson’s conception of supervenience is, despite certain formal similarities, quite different from Kim’s and clearly captures a sense of psychophysical dependence that is of use to forms of physicalism. As I see it, the difference between Kim’s approach and Davidson’s lies in the items supervenience is thought to connect. Kim’s formulations of supervenience connect properties, which he takes to be the ontological building blocks of events. In general then, Kim treats supervenience as a metaphysical thesis about the distribution of properties in possible worlds. By contrast, Davidson has little tolerance for the idea that events should be analyzed in terms of property exemplifications. Given Davidson’s reluctance to endorse properties, he prefers to think of supervenience as a relation between