Philosophical jargon: Supervenience
The verb supervene originally referred to something that happened unexpectedly. Sometime in the 20th Century a philosophical technical meaning appeared, cemented by Davidson in this passage:
Subsequently, in the 1980s and 1990s, philosophers explored the idea further and summed it up by the slogan there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference. Supervenience is a relationship that has modal connotations. An example of how it works:
Just about everybody agrees that the mental supervenes on the physical, which means that the only way for a mental state to change is for something physical to change. Disagreements arise regarding the form of necessity here.
More to come.
Davidson:[M]ental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics. Such supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respect, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respect without altering in some physical respect (1970, 214).
Subsequently, in the 1980s and 1990s, philosophers explored the idea further and summed it up by the slogan there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference. Supervenience is a relationship that has modal connotations. An example of how it works:
Just about everybody agrees that the mental supervenes on the physical, which means that the only way for a mental state to change is for something physical to change. Disagreements arise regarding the form of necessity here.
More to come.
Comments (99)
I think one reason to use jargon is that it allows a bunch of unwieldy ideas to be carted out efficiently. So as I was reading about meaning normativism. The idea is that we can't have meaning without norms. But which came first? Is it that meaning norms are in force because expressions have meaning? Or do expressions have meaning because of related norms? A metaphysical look examines supervenience relations. The problem is: you can't really follow this kind of examination until you grasp the ins and outs of supervenience. :grimace:
Interesting question. I don't think I've ever used the word supervenience in discussions with other electrical engineers, although other EEs certainly have to understand the notion of supervenience regardless of whether they have any familiarity with the word.
I do think using "supervenience" is useful in philosophy however, to convey a rather specific sort of dependency. For example I might say, "My minor children are dependent on me.", but I wouldn't say, "My minor children are supervenient on me."
Do you have a link to the essay or a title that can be searched?
This is the source of the quotation and a good intro to the subject.
Thank you.
The interesting thing about a supervenience relation is that it's not a causal relationship. It's just telling us that there's some kind of ontological connection between two things. So when we say the mental supervenes on the physical, we're saying that if we had two humans who were identical in every way physically, they will necessarily have the same mental state.
In this, we haven't explained anything about why the two things are related in this way. We aren't necessarily being reductionist, for instance.
In the case of mental-physical supervenience, debate centers around whether this relationship is metaphysically necessary, which would mean we can't conceive a universe where this relation doesn't hold, or is it nomologically necessary, which means it holds by our laws of physics.
Because I think supervenience can reference and unentailed correlation.
For example mental state A supervenes upon brain state B in that without A there is no B and without B there is no A, meaning if and only A then B, but it's a correlation where dependency isn't necessitated.
A materialist would reference this type of supervenience as entailment because they believe B causes A.
A dualist would agree there is supervenience between A and B, but would deny a causative link, meaning they would disagree that it is entailed.
For that reason, the word "supervenience" does not mean dependence. It just means the presence of A and B occuring at the same time, but sometimes caused and sometimes coincidental.
This is the source of the mind/body problem for the dualist who has to explain why every time I have thought X, I have a neuronal event Y, but the two just happen to exist parellel to one another.
I think this is what I was saying above to @T Clark, but one of the problems often brought forth by the substance dualist is that there is not empirical proof that brain state X always causes behavior Y because fMRI results do not show that for every instance of behavior Y the exact areas of the brain show activity.
What this would mean is that brain activity supervenes with behavioral activity 100% of the time, but the precise brain activity down to the neuronal level is variable. That means that for person A who is an exact replica of person B (down the neuronal level), the substance dualist would not necessarily commit that the two would exhibit exact behaviors. Sometimes brain state A yields behavior X and sometimes Y.
True. You wouldn't think the two just accidentally track. :up:
Quoting frank
So, do you think it follows that if two people had the same mental state that they would necessarily be the same physically?
I sometimes wonder what physical difference there would be in understanding something. I mean, say, for example, I am trying to learn maths - I was always very poor at maths - but I learned at least some maths and a bit of algebra. So how does the ability to understand maths and algebra, in whatever degree, supervene on or otherwise relate to physical configurations in the brain?
Such symbolically-mediated knowledge can be represented in a variety of ways. We have our conventional numerical system, but theres no reason there mightnt be other quite different systems of representation that still signify the same values. Furthermore in computation, all such symbols are converted to binary code. So the meaning can stay constant, while the physical forms are changeable. So if even the physical forms of the symbols that represent maths can be varied while preserving the meaning, then in what sense can maths be said to be physical?
I suspect theres a subterfuge in supervenience. What I think Davidson wants to establish is that brain states actually represent understanding. But if brain states are physical, as distinct from symbolic, then how can they represent anything? I mean, crystals, marks on paper, clouds, stellar formations - all physical things - dont mean anything whatever. They might mean something to a chemist, a reader, a metereologist, or an astronomer, respectively, but thats because theyre trained in how to interpret such phenomena - they can see the meaning in them. Surely brain-states are analogous to that, insofar as theyre physical. So to say a mental act supervenes on physical states is a futile attempt at reductionism as far as Im concerned by attempting to paper over the fundamental difference between the interpretive and the physical domains.
This is because Davidson, as a physicalist, has to show that mind, thought or judgement are dependent on the physical, as the physical is ultimately what is real. If mind, thought or judgement has any intrinsic or independent reality, then physicalism fails. So supervenience - called a term of art in the SEP entry on same - becomes an essential gap-filler in all kinds of physicalist arguments for philosophy of mind.
Hence the new term is useful.
The tone and texture supervenes on the physical structure.
Similarly, for Davidson, some particular intention (a mental state) may have different physical sources (a physical state). Hence the anomalism of the mental. The same state of mind may be the result of various physical states of the brain.
I think I first saw the term in R. M. Hare, but was never very pleased with it.
That strikes me as an error. Mind is as real as brain.
Yes. fMRI is far from being a technology capable of showing "exact" areas of the brain, much less the enormous amount of dynamic activity involved in the massively parallel information processing going on in there.
Consider this photo with motion blur and add focus blur with your imagination.
Then consider asking whether the image you are imagining is sufficient to prove that T. Clark picked your pocket.
Wherever we might draw a line representing "sufficient data for neuroscience to comprehensively explain consciousness", fMRI scans are a long way from crossing that line. Not to say that neuroscience hasn't come a long way, or that fMRI isn't an awesome achievement for social primates like ourselves.
On the other hand, there are lots of other avenues of empirical investigation that all seem to be pointing in the same direction. So the scientific picture might be seen as analogous to a jigsaw puzzle with the edges fully completed. Tough competition for dualists, on the empirical evidence front.
Well, I'm not rejecting it either.
How convenient for you. Like a lurking moray, backed into a crevice, ready to lunge at any passing morsel, secure in the knowledge that nothing is behind you.
Davidson, I think, would tend to say that mental state A is the result of brain state B, but that it might also be the result of brain states C and D. Hence mental state A is not dependent on brain state B; and the need for a novel term.
I know @SophistiCat added the SEP article, but it's worth noting the formalization of supervenience in this thread I think --
Which still is hard for me to read through.
Oh, yeah - sorry, @SophistiCat. Good move.
There's a break in the symmetry that I think some have not recognised - that ??y(Gy ? Fy) does not give us ??y(Fy ? Gy).
Quoting frank
Isn't it contrary to the law of identity to speak of "two" physical occurrences which are in every way alike. If they are in every way alike, they are necessarily one and the same, not "two". So the whole premise of this thought experiment, the assumption of two distinct physical occurrences which are exactly alike, is fundamentally flawed making that thought experiment pointless.
Quoting Hanover
So this is an example of the problem exposed above. When "brain state X" is referred to, what is meant is a specific type of brain state, not a particular condition of a brain which is exactly and precisely identical to the particular condition of another brain which is said to have "brain state X". In reality, "brain state X" refers to a generalized "brain state" which ignores many peculiarities of an actual brain's state, making brain state X a broadly universal condition, allowing that two very different brains, can both be said to have "brain state X". So the whole argument about supervenience is just so deeply flawed, and not worthy of serious philosophical discussion.
Yea, I'm pretty sure I screwed that up. I'll need to ponder it a little more.
Suppose we defer consideration of a law of identity, and consider two identical beings in different possible worlds, with the difference between the two worlds being of negligible relevance to the two beings.
So would I.
So, is that to say that you recognize a formal statement in one language but cannot translate it into another?
A lot of the confusion in this thread is addressed in the SEP article. Here is an excerpt on the fact that supervenience is non-symmetric:
Quoting SEP | Supervenience and Entailment
---
Quoting T Clark
Here is an excerpt on dependence:
Quoting SEP | Supervenience, Grounding, and Ontological Depdendence
Yep.
So you take it that supervenience means a cause but a non-essential cause? My hand pain supervenes with a splinter being in it, but it could also supervene with a hammer hitting it?
Why? Have you a direction for this thread?
As the whole discussion about 'supervenience' centres the argument that 'mental states supervene on physical states', then it is at least germane to say what is covered by the term 'mental state'.
My direction, I've already given. It's a variation on multiple realizability which was Putnam's argument against supervenience.
And "essence" seems to be creeping back into the discussions here, a problem in itself. Quoting Hanover
What's that, then?
Too much for a sleepy Saturday afternoon.
I think the text pretty clear and am not sure what I might say to elucidate it further. But see .
Relevant excerpt:
Quoting SEP | Supervenience, Grounding, and Ontological Depdendence
So when you say that, "Without B there is no A," you seem to be positing an ontological dependence which overlooks the possibility of grounding overdetermination. Nevertheless, ontological dependence and grounding are both separate from supervenience.
Regarding the relation of entailment to supervenience:
Quoting SEP | Supervenience and Entailment
I don't see how that follows.
Emphasis on the word Physical.
Because if the mental act of grasping a logical truth supervenes on a physical state, then there is a causal relationship between the former and the latter, isnt there? How can it not follow?
@Leontiskos - can you throw any light on my query? It seems related to the last paragraph you quote from the SEP entry but Im struggling with putting it together.
Well, given Davidson treats reasons as causes, that's no small question.
It's a really pivotal question, not something with a quick answer. At least, not from me.
And that is the article I was contemplating as the first in a mooted series on Davidson, just for amusement.
But small steps.
What kinds of 'law' do you think this is referring to here? I presume the laws which govern causal relationships. So supervenience has to obtain here, so that 'mental events' can be said to be causally efficacious and so as to avoid any implication of dualism.
Well, a regularity along the lines of "A whenever B".
So a mass experiencing an action will always result in a reaction.
Yet wanting a beer and believing there is some in the fridge need not always result in one gong to the fridge.
Two rational explanations, one with law-like characteristics, the other, not so much.
And yet it is not beyond the pale to say that you went to the fridge because you wanted a beer.
Is that a causal explanation for your going to the fridge?
All very rough. Dibs you can't hold me to any of this.
But more reason to consider a thread, or threads, on Davidson.
The point is, that to be two beings there must be something which distinguishes them as one different from the other. If what distinguishes them one from the other, is "being in different possible words" then we cannot say that the difference between the two worlds is of negligible relevance, because we've already propositioned that this difference is what distinguishes them one from the other. Since being two distinct things rather than one and the same thing is fundamentally a significant difference, then it's necessarily of very significant relevance.
The only way which I see to proceed is to employ the proposition that the difference which makes two things distinct, instead of one and the same thing, is not a significant difference. But that is just asking for all sorts of logical dilemmas because that premise would annihilate our capacity to analyze differences, by saying that differences in general are insignificant. But that makes all things the same, and whatever means we might employ to distinguish one thing from another would be completely arbitrary.
Quoting Banno
You got me thirsty already, and it's not even 7:00 AM: https://btpshop.ca/
Quoting Wayfarer
When thoroughly analyzed there is very little difference in the application of Aristotle's final cause and material cause, in the sense that they can each be applied toward the very same effects. The most significant difference though is that material cause is potential while final cause can be understood as actual. Because of this "material cause" is inadequate for understanding many of the things it is applied toward, as it cannot account for agency. So "the reason for", and "the cause of" are very distinct in the way that they do, or do not, account for agency.
In Banno's example, if I say wanting a beer "caused me to go" to the fridge (final cause), it is also necessarily the reason why I went to the fridge. Agency is accounted for as an act of the will. But if I say wanting a beer "was the reason why I went" to the fridge, there is no agency implied, causation is therefore not accounted for, and we are left uninformed as to the cause. Then one might look to the brain, or some other factor as the cause.
I think I have it straight now. To some extent supervenience is intuitive. The music created by an orchestra supervenes on the actions of the players. You could also say the music entails these actions.
Or what if orchestral music evolves in so that it becomes more AI driven. That fact would supervene in all sorts of activities at lower levels.
If we think of supervenience as pertaining to propositions, the truth of "Orchestral music evolved" is true IFF statements about required activities at the lower level are true.
So it has to do with intuitions about emergent events, that they necessarily track events at the lower level.
As applied to the mind body problem, a neophyte might think the debate is about whether the mental supervenes on the physical. Generally speaking, that's not the debate because we already know that pain emerges from nociceptors, and so on.
But I think an eliminativist would deny that the mental supervenes on the physical just because she denies that there's any such thing as a separation between mental and physical. There has to be some kind of distinction.
Next: supervenience and normativity, otherwise known as the is-ought problem.
I was thinking I might be able to help you out of that logical straitjacket keeping you from productively considering the thought experiment. Perhaps another time.
Yes, I see your point.
As I understand it, supervenience and causation are two different things:
Quoting SEP | Supervenience and Realization
The concrete point here is that just because a mental act supervenes on a physical state, it does not follow that it is caused by that physical state. I think someone could even hold to the supervenience while also maintaining that the mental state causes the physical state, for example.
Reason/explanation is also a bit different from supervenience:
Quoting SEP | Supervenience and Explanation
See also, "Supervenience as a philosophical term of art."
I am glad that you two are sussing out some of the ambiguity between supervenience, cause, reason, etc. Much of the language in this thread is being used too loosely.
Sidenote: I did not receive a notification that you mentioned me, which is why I am late to this. I think it might be because you added the mention in an edit. If so, I think this is a quasi-bug that would be good for the forum wish list.
There is a fair amount of overlap though. The nature of a supervenience relation is formally stipulated. That's what's helpful about it. But there's no exclusion of causality, entailment, or dependency.
But there is also no inclusion of those notions, and so the overlap is accidental. In this thread we often see overlap mistaken for identity. For example, in your previous post you incorrectly imply that logical supervenience guarantees entailment (via your 'if-an-only-if' definition). For the most part supervenience brings with it entailment, but entailment does not suffice for supervenience.
Quoting SEP | Supervenience and Entailment
This definitely reminds me of cartesian dualism. :smile:
As a philosophical Iayman, I don't often use the technical jargon "supervene" (to come after) in brain/mind discussions. Instead, I merely note that Mind (latin : mens, to think ; anim, life ; spirit) is the function (operation ; performance) of Brain. Hence, Mind is simply what a Brain does. In mathematics, a function is an input/output relationship : this follows logically from that. Thus sensory inputs, processed in the Brain, result in the Mental product that we call Ideas & Meanings.
Today, we would more likely say that both Life & Mind are the results of processed "Energy" inputs, instead of Spiritual influences. For example, a lifeless rock might seem to be momentarily animated when it is acted upon by gravity or impetus. But animation (self-moving) & mentation (mind function) requires a much more complex structure (logical path), such as a neural network, to channel energy inputs into computations that convert raw causation into conception.
For a Change of Mind though, there is no need for the physical structure of the Brain to change. That's because its labyrinthine convoluted construction inherently allows for feedback loops that result in the self-reflexive interactions that we call "awareness" or "consciousness". Those higher brain "functions" add the internal self-image to the inputs of incoming information, thus putting the self into a larger context : a self-other interrelationship.
The causal Necessity for Physical matter to produce Mental thoughts may be due to the information processing that we know as "computation" or "calculation", which are merely variations on logical operations such as "And, Or, Not" or "Add, Subtract, Divide". By such material means, the logical structure of the universe is expressed in the reasoning of brains. Cosmic Logic is simply how the world works, and brains are merely local processors of Energy in the form of meaningful information. :smile:
Could you be more specific?
Some quotes:
Quoting frank
I think this direction of entailment is necessary but not sufficient for supervenience. This is because A can entail B without "exact similarity with respect to B-properties guarantee[ing] exact similarity with respect to A-properties."
Quoting frank
Given the differences between entailment and supervenience, I am not convinced this sort of IFF correctly represents supervenience. But I suppose I would need more clarity on what you are saying here.
I don't know what you're saying here. Are you suggesting that supervenience is "exact similarity with respect to B-properties guarantee[ing] exact similarity with respect to A-properties"?
That quoted words do not describe supervenience.
@Wayfarer - If I am right about this then it constitutes a stark example of the way that supervenience as a philosophical term of art differs from the colloquial or etymological meaning of supervenience. This may be part of the reason why the mental/physical debate gets so tricky. Another reason is probably that there are so many interrelated notions of supervenience, even in the philosophical sphere.
Effectively, the distance between the philosophical meaning of the term and the colloquial and etymological meaning biases the debate.
---
Quoting frank
It was a quote from the SEP definition of supervenience, in the introduction of the article you quoted from in your OP:
Quoting SEP | Supervenience Introduction
It makes more sense in context.
The properties of a production of Beethoven's 7th supervene on the properties of the orchestra involved.
The second part starting with "equivalently," is saying that the only way to have an exact duplicate of a musical production would be to exactly duplicate the actions of the orchestra playing it. That's a convoluted way to get the idea across, but it's true. That does describe the kind of relation we're specifying with supervenience. It's definitely an IFF kind of relation.
Let me just repeat my claim now that you see that the definition is accurate:
Quoting Leontiskos
Well, not to quibble, but because you left the IFF off of the beginning of the sentence, your quote from the SEP didn't make any sense.
But I think the reason "entail" isn't exactly equivalent to "supervene" is because the latter is proprietary wording and the former isn't.
Quoting frank
It would only fail to make sense if someone did not understand that we are considering the possibility of A supervening on B, but this should be apparent both because it is the standard usage which was present even in your OP, and because A and B were introduced explicitly via the entailment relation that you put forward.
Quoting frank
Hmm. Both terms have technical and non-technical senses. I don't think any mixture of those senses would support your idea that, "You could also say the music entails these actions." The SEP article covers the difference between supervenience and entailment in some detail.
No, it fails to make sense because you left out an important part of the sentence, namely the leading IFF.
Quoting Leontiskos
Entailment and supervenience aren't identical, but supervenience can overlap entailment, causality, and dependence.
Anscombe has a piece of paper on which she has written a list of items to be purchased. Unbeknownst to her, as she collects the items, a spy writes a list of the things she collects.
It would not be too difficult to arrange the thought experiment so that the two lists were physically identical.
Yet the lists differ markedly in the attitude taken to them.
That attitude, our intent towards each list, supervenes on the list.
We have two lists that are physically identical, so their molecules are arranged exactly the same?
But the lists were created under different circumstances.
Do our attitudes supervene in the actual lists? Or on the ways they were created?
Quoting SEP: Anscombe
It happens sometimes, its a sporadic bug. You'll still generally see them on your Mentions page.
My take is that the term supervenience has been used to preserve the credibility of naturalist and physicalist accounts of the mind and intentionality - not that physicalism is explicit in its formulation, but because it's the presumed consensus of the peer group for whom all of this material is written, namely, other academics. Notice in the intro to the SEP entry, 'For example, it has been claimed that aesthetic, moral, and mental properties supervene upon physical properties.'
I attempted to leap in with a sweeping argument based on the impossibility of reducing rational propositions to brain-states. But I'm learning that, by the rules of this particular language-game, the arguments are very carefully circumscribed, and are anything but sweeping, so I will refrain from flailing about henceforth.
Quoting Banno
However, that seems to conflict with the leading quotation which says that 'supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respect, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respect without altering in some physical respect'.
Subtle, ain't it?
https://divinecuration.github.io/assets/pdf/davidson-mental-events.pdf. p. 141
Great. Problem solved.
You should stay away from details. That's where the devil is.
(Rather surprised, reading that paper, to note mention of Noosa Heads as an hypothetical example of a place name. Did Donald Davidson visit or holiday in Australia?)
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour
The Nomological Net is not unlike Searle's background, and seems related to Wittgenstein's hinges. But consider this against the recent Kripke's skeptical challenge thread - Kripke's argument against being able to tell someone is following a rule.
Well, I left off the merely definitional part because we were already talking about the supervenience of A on B, "A-properties supervene on B-properties if and only if..." But in fact you knew exactly what I meant, and you responded by claiming that the "quoted words do not describe supervenience."
Quoting frank
Okay, I can agree with that.
I didn't know what you meant. You're right that I would have understood you if I'd been more familiar with standard definitions of supervenience. But I'm just a poor coal miner trying to think through some stuff. Hope you can overlook it.
Wouldn't someone like Davidson just say that it is precisely through the different physical events and characteristics that we know the different [final causes] of the two lists?
'In understanding a physical system qua physical, we do not and need not attribute to it beliefs, desires, or any other sort of intentionality, and we do not expect it to abide by norms of rationality. Such systems are governed instead (at least on the modern mechanistic conception of the natural world) by patterns of brute, purposeless efficient causation. This should already make us suspicious of the very idea of a one-to-one match-up between mental state types and physical state types. The notion seems to rest on a category mistake, a failure to understand that the network of rationally-cum-semantically interrelated mental states is no more susceptible of a smooth correlation with a particular network of causally interrelated physical states than the content of a book can be smoothly correlated with a certain kind of physical format (a modern printed book, say, as opposed to a scroll, wax tablet, or electronic book). As Wilfrid Sellars might put it, the space of reasons and the space of causes are simply incommensurable.')
Thank you, I read the whole thing and it was helpful. I am not familiar enough with Davidson's thought to confidently interpret short quotations, so Feser is a good mediator.
What's interesting to me is the Aristotelian-Thomistic maxim that, "Nothing is in the mind that was not first in the senses," and the way it parallels the thesis that the mental supervenes on the physical. I don't think Aristotelians can ultimately hold to such supervenience, but it is an interesting parallel.
I searched Feser's blog posts for 'supervenience' and this is the first thing that came up:
Quoting Edward Feser | Supervenience on the hands of an angry God
This is almost exactly what you were worried about, no?
I have not followed these debates in philosophy of mind, and therefore my exposure to the term 'supervenience' is more quotidian. I think this helps me in some ways but harms me in others, given that there are such bitter debates in philosophy of mind that hang on the precise meaning of supervenience.
Quoting Edward Feser
That seems exactly right to me.
Surely it must be acknowledged that there could not be two performances of a musical piece that were exactly the same, because not only the actions of the orchestra would need to be exactly the same, but the temperature, the humidity, the weight of every musician, the building, the state of the building, the exact location of all the players, exactly the same audience and their locations, and so on.
So, what could it mean to say that in order for a mental state (or better, process or event) to be the same, the neural state would have to be the same, when this would also entail the entire bodily and environmental states being the same, which would by extension entail the entire world and the solar system (at least) being the same?
Also, you didn't answer my previous question which was that if we accept that mental events could not be the same without neural events also being the same, does this not entail that neural events could not be the same without mental events being the same, leaving the question as to what direction we should understand the supervenience to follow?
Quoting Edward Feser | Supervenience on the hands of an angry God
This is kinda what I'm getting at; it seems we must think that there is a causal direction at work, unless we want to claim that the mental and physical are codependent, or that mental phenomena are really epiphenomena, or that we have just one neutral thing under the two descriptions: mental and physical, and all of these conceptual scenarios would seem to render the very idea of supervenience moot.
That's pretty well it. I'm not specifically aligned with Thomism, but, on the other hand, I think the case can be made that Aristotelian Thomism is a Western form of perennialism, and my sympathies lie nearer to that, than to the current mainstream. On the other hand, I do recognise that space needs to be given for discussion of the modern mainstream, so having expressed my objection, I'll butt out. (BTW that last quote attributed to me is from Ed Feser, although I'm in furious agreement with the thrust of it.)
I'm not sure Wilfred Sellars thought they were incommensurable tout court; I think his project was at least partly concerned with attempting to find some way in which what seems incommensurable could be co-measured. I could be wrong about that, as I am only superficially familiar with Sellar's work.
The other point here is that even if we cannot find a "smooth correlation", which can be coherently understood, between particular causally interrelated states and particular rationally interrelated mental states, that does not entail that there are not strict correlations between the two but could be down to the limitations of our understanding.
And thus I come to understand the basis of your worries. The colloquial and etymological sense of 'supervenience' lends itself to epiphenomenalism, so it should come as no surprise that recasting it as a "philosophical term of art" failed to fully insulate it from that broader semantic context. Much of what I have said in this thread presupposes SEP's claim that it is merely a technical term of art. Now I'm not so sure if this can be granted.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think so too.
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree again.
Quoting Wayfarer
Fixed. :wink:
But Davidson says there are no psycho-physical laws, which I take to mean that there are no laws which detemine mental acts analogous to the laws which govern physical events (presumably those are the laws of physics - he says 'Physical theory promises to provide a comprehensive closed system guaranteed to yield a standardized, unique description of every physical event couched in a vocabulary amenable to law.')
But this is where I'm asking, what about the logical laws? Rules of valid inference? If you know that x is the case, then you can infer that y must be the case. If that is a mental act, then it's appealing to the 'law of reason', isn't it? And we have to presume such laws hold if we are to make any kind of argument. They're embedded in every act of reason. But then, maybe I'm talking at cross-purposes to Davidson, I've only just read this one paper (and intend to read it a second time, it's said to be one of his seminal papers.)
Can you give an example of such an inference which is not merely a matter of definition?
In the post of Feser's that you referenced above this seems to be related to, "3. There are no strict laws on the basis of which we can predict and explain mental phenomena." If I read Feser correctly, then it is more the idea that there are no laws that connect the psychic and the physical realms in a strict way (and this is based on the "Principle of the Anomalism of the Mental").
Davidson says:
Quoting Davidson, Mental Events, p. 141
It seems that he is saying that the "mental" truth predicate, 'true-in-L', is not reducible to the "physical" ?. This seems right to me, because universals have greater extension than particulars.
You underestimate the power of the Dark Si... erm, of Materialism. :naughty:
Isnt much of scientific exploration built around reasoned conjecture of that kind? Using a discovery made about some subject to infer that, if we do this, or observe that, then this will happen, or we will observe that. Also recall that in the progress of mathematical physics the last hundred years, many discoveries were made which required the development of a new conceptual language and novel terminology, which was then extended by the processes of inference. A stellar example would be Einsteins prediction of the curvature of light by the mass of stars, confirmation of which made Arthur Eddington famous.
But notice, that is an argument Ive put forward - theres nothing directly corresponding to such a conjecture in Davidsons paper or the articles on supervenience that weve been referencing. It may be completely off target for some reason that I havent understood yet. I have to allow that possibility.
I don't think there are any strict laws associated with this type of conjecture. With deductive logic the main law is consistency, that the conclusion(s) follow strictly from the premises. _
Quoting Wayfarer
Sure, I've made that point myself more than 25 years ago in arguments with an eliminative materialist who used to attend the same classes in philosophy at Sydney University Centre for Continuing Education as I was at the time, but as I say I don't see it so much as an argument or conjecture, but rather as simply pointing out something that is unarguably true.
We might have to do some superdupervenience here shortly.
I suppose.
Going through this thread and it seemed worth pointing out that fMRI doesn't come anywhere near individual neuron level resolution. The last I looked it was around 50,000 neurons per voxel (volume-pixel). It is to be expected that fMRI voxels are variable because the spatial resolution (not to mention the temporal resolution) is far too poor to detect the subtleties of what is occurring.