Weak Supervenience and Materialism

Abstract

The concept of supervenience is not new, going back at least to G. E. Moore,' but it is only since Donald Davidson employed the concept in the development of a psycho-physical identity theory' that philosophers have expended any great effort on it in areas beyond ethics. In a series of elegant papers, Jaegwon Kim3 has greatly clarified the issues that arise from the consideration of supervenience, as well as making distinctive applications of the concept. In this paper, I wish to question one of Kim's claims, made in Concepts of Supervenience, concerning the relation of supervenience to materialism, and to consider what might be a better formulation of materialism. Intuitively, the concept of supervenience is that of a relation between two families of properties (as, for example, physical properties and mental properties). This relation is one of dependence so that if two objects are indiscernible with regard to one family then they are indiscernible with regard to the other as well. In the. case of materialism, the 'slogan' of supervenience would be, 'no difference without a physical difference'. If a family of properties, A, superveniently depends upon another family, B, then we may also say that B determines A (in one sense of 'determines' at