Strong Global Supervenience is Valuable

Abstract

It is generally assumed that everything that can be said about dependence with the notion of strong global supervenience can also be said with the notion of strong supervenience. It is argued here, however, that strong global supervenience has a metaphysically distinctive role to play. It is shown that when the relevant sets include relations, strong global supervenience and strong supervenience are distinct. It is then concluded that there are claims about dependence of relations that can be made with the global notion of strong supervenience but not with the “local” (individual) one.