Humean Supervenience and Possible Worlds

Abstract

The position defended is compatible with a coherent development of a reductive account of modality. It is less significant for the principle of recombination than previously thought and the principle of recombination is unlikely to play successfully its role as a principle of plenitude in any event. The distinct existences principle is defended against an argument that it is necessarily false. In fact, by comparison, we have more reason to believe in the possibility of worlds in which Humean supervenience is true and there is causation, than in physicalism about phenomenal consciousness. The counterfactual theory of causation, and surrounding framework, explains why this is the appropriate verdict at which to arrive. Some aspects of the variety of causation may be understood as a determinate-determinable relation but the different vertically fundamental bases are better understood as partial realizations. Causation is one horizontally fundamental metaphysical category but there may be others.