Concept Of Supervenience Research Articles

Quantum Entanglement Undermines Structural Realism

Abstract Quantum entanglement poses a challenge to the traditional metaphysical view that an extrinsic property of an object is determined by its intrinsic properties. So structural realists might be tempted to cite quantum entanglement as evidence for structural realism. I argue, however, that quantum entanglement undermines structural realism. If we classify two entangled electrons as a single system, we can say that their spin properties are intrinsic properties of the system, and that we can have knowledge about these intrinsic properties. Specifically, we can know that the parts of the system are entangled and spatially separated from each other. In addition, the concept of supervenience neither illuminates quantum entanglement nor helps structural realism.

Субъектность и адаптивность современной молодежи: возможности измерения (экспертизы) нефизических величин

It should be noted that the current situation in Russia with regard to the socio-psychological adaptation of young people (age 17—25) to the changing digital environment does not find a proper theoretical and practical solution. Therefore, representatives of the socio-humanitarian sciences need their own methodology for measuring the adaptability of young people as the basis of their creative life. We believe that the key strategic line in the development of adaptability is to support of a young person formation as a subject of his own life. Despite the challenges of the times, the problem of adaptation in the aspect of subjectivity is limited to the spread of “myths” about the digital society and the declarative statements arising from them without a proper strategic and tactical scientific program. In this regard, the fundamental scientific result of our project will be developing, testing and evaluating the effectiveness of the methodology for measuring the socio-psychological adaptation of young people, developed on the basis of digital anthropology and metrology, which can be used as an interdisciplinary model of socio-humanitarian examination of subjectivity and adaptability. The assessment scale can be based on the idea of a standard (value, meaning), which form subjectivity, are formulated by the subject, determine the direction of his activity, his abilities, the project of his being. The model of this complex non-physical quantity can be represented through the concept of supervenience. Supervenience enables us to explain reductively through functional analysis. By explaining how functions are performed, we will explain the phenomenon. The cognitive model of subjectivity is such an abstractly causally organized system, the mechanisms of which are sufficient for implementing the corresponding functions. Then this model becomes logically possible, and, therefore, empirically confirmed (or refuted). Thus, it becomes possible to theoretically substantiate and experimentally prove that subjectivity is the basis of adaptability (strong option) or adaptability is closely related to subjectivity (weak option) and that for each type of adaptive activity the basis is a certain type of subjectivity. On the basis of this, an interdisciplinary model of socio-humanitarian examination of subjectivity and adaptability will be developed.

Sawyer’s Theory of Social Causation: A Critique

This article critiques R. Keith Sawyer’s theory of social causation from his 2005 book Social Emergence. It considers his use of analogy with the philosophy of mind, his account of individual agency, the legacy of Emile Durkheim, the concepts of supervenience, multiple realization, and wild disjunction, and the role of history in social causation. Sawyer’s theory is also evaluated in terms of two examples of empirical research: his own micro-sociological studies into group creativity; and Margaret Archer’s macro-sociology of education systems.

Ruminations on Intermittent Existence

Can objects exist, cease to exist, and then exist once more? I lay out three ways to think about intermittent existence (IE). The first section is based on intuitions. The second section will show that the intuitions are bolstered by the concept of supervenience. The final section will argue that the strongest way to think about IE, and about supervenience, is in terms of mereology, the theory of parts and wholes.

Interventionism and Supervenience: A New Problem and Provisional Solution

The causal exclusion argument suggests that mental causes are excluded in favour of the underlying physical causes that do all the causal work. Recently, a debate has emerged concerning the possibility of avoiding this conclusion by adopting Woodward's interventionist theory of causation. Both proponents and opponents of the interventionist solution crucially rely on the notion of supervenience when formulating their positions. In this article, we consider the relation between interventionism and supervenience in detail and argue that importing supervenience relations into the interventionist framework is deeply problematic. However, rather than reject interventionist solutions to exclusion wholesale, we wish to propose that the problem lies with the concept of supervenience. This would open the door for a moderate defence of the interventionist solution to the exclusion argument.

From Grounding to Supervenience?

The concept of supervenience and a regimented concept of grounding are often taken to provide rival explications of pre-theoretical concepts of dependence and determination. Friends of grounding typically point out that supervenience claims do not entail corresponding grounding claims. Every fact supervenes on itself, but is not grounded in itself, and the fact that a thing exists supervenes on the fact that its singleton exists, but is not grounded in it. Common lore has it, though, that grounding claims do entail corresponding supervenience claims. In this article, I show that this assumption is problematic. On one way of understanding it, the corresponding supervenience claim is just an entailment claim under a different name. On another way of understanding it, the corresponding claim is a distinctive supervenience claim, but its specification gives rise to what I call the reference type problem: to associate the classes of facts that are the relata of grounding with the types of facts that are the relata of supervenience. However it is understood, supervenience rules out prima facie possibilities: alien realizers, blockers, heterogeneous realizers, floaters, and heterogeneous blockers. Instead of being rival explications of one and the same pre-theoretical concept, grounding and supervenience may be complementary concepts capturing different aspects of determination and dependence.

Concepts of Supervenience Revisited

Over the last 3 decades a vast literature has been dedicated to supervenience. Much of it has focused on the analysis of different concepts of supervenience and their philosophical consequences. This paper has two objectives. One is to provide a short, up-do-date, guide to the formal relations between the different concepts of supervenience. The other is to reassess the extent to which these concepts can establish metaphysical theses, especially about dependence. The conclusion is that strong global supervenience is the most advantageous notion of supervenience that we have.

Mechanisms, determination and the metaphysics of neuroscience

In this paper, I evaluate recently defended mechanistic accounts of the unity of neuroscience from a metaphysical point of view. Considering the mechanistic framework in general (Sections 2 and 3), I argue that explanations of this kind are essentially reductive (Section 4). The reductive character of mechanistic explanations provides a sufficiency criterion, according to which the mechanism underlying a certain phenomenon is sufficient for the latter. Thus, the concept of supervenience can be used in order to describe the relation between mechanisms and phenomena (Section 5). Against this background, I show that the mechanistic framework is subject to the causal exclusion problem and faces the classical metaphysical options when it comes to the relations obtaining between different levels of mechanisms (Section 6). Finally, an attempt to improve the metaphysics of mechanisms is made (Section 7) and further difficulties are pointed out (Section 8).

Levels of analysis: philosophical issues.

A focal concern in the philosophy of cognitive science is whether the world is fundamentally organized into hierarchies of levels and whether mental phenomena exemplify such higher-level regularities and hence are unexplainable by lower-level theory. Levels of analysis represent different stances from which predictive and explanatory theories are constructed, and each level of analysis contains a set of kind terms representing things in nature, predicates representing properties or relations, and law-like generalizations or principles. The concept of levels of analysis, which plays a central role in debates over the cognitive architecture of the mind in cognitive science, is concerned mainly with the choice of which level of analysis can be expected to maximize the predictability and explanatory power of cognitive modeling. The core philosophical issues concerning the levels of analysis are the problem of theoretical reduction between the levels, the concept of supervenience, the problem of emergent properties, and the conceptual coherence of the notion of downward causation. WIREs Cogn Sci 2012, 3:315-325. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1179 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Sobreveniencia. Un Caso de Ingeniería Conceptual

The paper analyses the main trends in the discussions about the notion of supervenience in the last decades, putting the emphasis in some crucial problems. The starting point will be the various concepts of supervenience proposed by Jaegwon Kim. Through them, we will identify a dramatic tension between the extremes of eliminativism and dualism (in general, pluralism), being placed in the middle of them the positions of a non-eliminativist reductionism and of a non-dualist epiphenomenism. The open options facing that tension show a very peculiar and valuable sort of philosophical work which could be called “conceptual engineering”.

Supervenience in socio‐economic systems

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to clarify issues concerning the implications and usefulness of the concept of supervenience in social analysis and research.Design/methodology/approachSupervenience refers to the notion that interaction in complex systems gives rise to superordinate phenomena, possessing qualities that differ from those of the interacting entities “below”. In order to discuss the application of the concept in sociology, the article draws upon the distinction between “weak” and “strong” supervenience. “Weak” supervenience characterizes the superordinate as being independent of any particular patterning at subordinate levels, while “strong” supervenience refers to the existence of tighter, more knowable, relationships between the super‐ and sub‐ordinate.FindingsThe paper finds that analyses of the social have long been preoccupied with supervenient properties. Indeed, sociological disciplines can be usefully characterized and distinguished in terms of whether they assume “weak” or “strong” supervenience in their analysis of human affairs.Research limitations/implicationsThe research needs further critical investigation of the use of supervenience in current sociological discourse and analysis.Practical implicationsThrough discussing its already important place in social analysis, the article argues for the refinement and critical application of supervenience in future social studies.Originality/valueThe paper reviews and refines issues concerning the importance and implications of supervenience for sociological analysis and social research.

Levels of explanation in biological psychology

Until recently, the notions of function and multiple realization were supposed to save the autonomy of psychological explanations. Furthermore, the concept of supervenience presumably allows both dependence of mind on brain and non-reducibility of mind to brain, reconciling materialism with an independent explanatory role for mental and functional concepts and explanations. Eliminativism is often seen as the main or only alternative to such autonomy. It gladly accepts abandoning or thoroughly reconstructing the psychological level, and considers reduction if successful as equivalent with elimination. In comparison with the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of biology has developed more subtle and complex ideas about functions, laws, and reductive explanation than the stark dichotomy of autonomy or elimination. It has been argued that biology is a patchwork of local laws, each with different explanatory interests and more or less limited scope. This points to a pluralistic, domain-specific and multi-level view of explanations in biology. Explanatory pluralism has been proposed as an alternative to eliminativism on the one hand and methodological dualism on the other hand. It holds that theories at different levels of description, like psychology and neuroscience, can co-evolve, and mutually influence each other, without the higher-level theory being replaced by, or reduced to, the lower-level one. Such ideas seem to tally with the pluralistic character of biological explanation. In biological psychology, explanatory pluralism would lead us to expect many local and non-reductive interactions between biological, neurophysiological, psychological and evolutionary explanations of mind and behavior. This idea is illustrated by an example from behavioral genetics, where genetics, physiology and psychology constitute distinct but interrelated levels of explanation. Accounting for such a complex patchwork of related explanations seems to require a more sophisticated and precise way of looking at levels than the existing ideas on (reductive and non-reductive) explanation in the philosophy of mind.

Critical Notice of Armstrong's and Lewis' Concepts of Supervenience

Critical Notice of Armstrong's and Lewis' Concepts of Supervenience

Blocking Definitions of Materialism

It is often thought that materialism about themind can be clarified using the concept of supervenience. But there is a difficulty. Amaterialist should admit the possibility ofghosts and thus should allow that a world mightduplicate the physical character of our worldand enjoy, in addition, immaterial beings withmental properties. So materialists can't claimthat every world that is physicallyindistinguishable from our world is alsomentally indistinguishable; and this is wellknown. What is less understood are thedifferent ways that immaterial add-ons can maketrouble for supervenience-theoreticformulations of materialism. In this paper, Ishall present a problematic kind of add-on thathas been ignored and look at threesupervenience-theoretic attempts to formulatematerialism in that light.

Theorising Social Constraint: The Concept of Supervenience

This paper evaluates Kieran Healy's recent contribution to the structure-agency debate. Supervenience, I argue, has multiple uses, it entails different ontological perspectives depending on which entities it is applied to and which conditions are placed upon subvening and supervening entities. Healy's use of supervenience is unclear. On the one hand, applied to individual-society relations it does nothing more than restate the trivial truth: no people - no society. On the other hand, if supervenience is to be applied to structure-agent relations the consequence is extreme voluntarism. In either case it simply fails to address Healy's key concern: conceptualising social constraint. I then argue that an alternative way of grasping structural constraint in the present might be to view past-tense `activity dependence' as `Cambridge events'.

Theorising Social Constraint: The Concept of Supervenience

This paper evaluates Kieran Healy's recent contribution to the structure-agency debate. Supervenience, I argue, has multiple uses, it entails different ontological perspectives depending on which entities it is applied to and which conditions are placed upon subvening and supervening entities. Healy's use of supervenience is unclear. On the one hand, applied to individual-society relations it does nothing more than restate the trivial truth: no people - no society. On the other hand, if supervenience is to be applied to structure-agent relations the consequence is extreme voluntarism. In either case it simply fails to address Healy's key concern: conceptualising social constraint. I then argue that an alternative way of grasping structural constraint in the present might be to view past-tense `activity dependence' as `Cambridge events'.

On Some Theoretical Grounds for an Organism-centered Biology: Property Emergence, Supervenience, and Downward Causation

In this paper, we investigate some theoretical grounds for bridging the gap between an organism-centered biology and the chemical basis of biological explanation, as expressed in the prevailing molecular perspective in biological research. First, we present a brief survey of the role of the organism concept in biological thought. We advance the claim that emergentism (with its fundamental tenets: ontological physicalism, qualitative novelty, property emergence, theory of levels, irreducibility of the emergents, and downward causation) can provide a metaphysical basis for a coherent sort of organicism. Downward causation (DC) is the key notion in emergentist philosophy, as shown by the tension between the aspects of dependence and nonreducibility in the concept of supervenience, preferred by many philosophers to emergence as a basis for nonreductive physicalism. As supervenience physicalism does not lead, arguably, to a stable nonreductive physicalist account, we maintain that a philosophical alternative worthy of investigation is that of a combination of supervenience and property emergence in the formulation of such a stance. Taking as a starting-point O’Connor’s definition of an emergent property, we discuss how a particular interpretation of downward causation (medium DC), inspired by Aristotelian causal modes, results in an explanation of property emergence compatible with both physicalism and non-reductionism. In this account of emergence, one may claim that biology, as a science of living organization, is and remains a science of the organism, even if completely explained by the laws of chemistry. We conclude the paper with a new definition of an emergent property.

Kim on the Mind—Body Problem

For three decades the writings of Jaegwon Kim have had a major influence in philosophy of mind and in metaphysics. Sixteen of his philosophical papers, together with several new postscripts, are collected in Kim (1993). The publication of this collection prompts the present essay.After some preliminary remarks in the opening section, in Section 2 I will briefly describe Kim's philosophical ‘big picture’ about the relation between the mental and the physical. In Section 3 I will situate Kim's approach on the larger philosophical landscape, vis-à-vis various other approaches frequently discussed in contemporary philosophy of mind. This comparative discussion will further illuminate Kim's own position, and also will serve as groundwork for subsequent discussion. In Section 4 I will point out certain persistent internal tensions in Kim's philosophical position on the mind-body problem, tensions that emerge especially clearly against the backdrop of Section 3's comparative discussion of Kim’s position relative to various competing positons.In the remainder of the paper I will focus on two issues at the heart of his position, with particular attention to what he says about them in some of the more recent papers and the postscripts in Kim [1993]. First, how should a materialist understand the notion that the mental is ‘determined’ by the physical? More specifically, what role, if any, should be played by the concept of supervenience in explicating this kind of determination relation? Kim's views on this matter have recently changed, and I will discuss the issue with particular attention to his own latest remarks on it. This is the business of Section 5.Second, need a viable materialism assert that mentalistic psychology is reducible to neurobiology (and ultimately to physics)? More specifically, should a materialist insist on reducibility, despite the currently influential line of argument used by non-reductive materialists, the ’multiple realization‘ argument? On this matter too, Kim's views have changed somewhat; again, I will discuss the issue with particular attention to his recent thinking. This is the business of Section 6.

Interdiscourse or supervenience relations: The primacy of the manifest image

Amidst the progress being made in the various (sub-)disciplines of the behavioural and brain sciences a somewhat neglected subject is the problem of how everything fits into one world and, derivatively, how the relation between different levels of discourse should be understood and to what extent different levels, domains, approaches, or disciplines are autonomous or dependent. In this paper I critically review the most recent proposals to specify the nature of interdiscourse relations, focusing on the concept of supervenience. Ideally supervenience is a relation between different discourses which has all the advantages of reduction, but without its disadvantages. I apply the more abstract considerations to two concrete cases: schizophrenia and colour. Usually an interlevel or interdiscourse relation is seen as asymmetrical: the overlaying discourse depends on the underlying discourse (and not vice versa), where the out- or un-spoken assumption is that the ultimate underlying discourse is physical. Instead I argue that scientific categories referred to in interdiscourse relations are, ultimately, dependent on common sense categories and common sense normative criteria. It is the manifest categories and common sense ideas about what is reasonable and what is right that determine the relevant categorisations at the deeper, underlying levels. I suggest that the implications of this are not merely methodological or epistemological.

Supervenience for operators

The modal primitivist who takes a sentential possibility operator ‘◊’ as her only modal resource can provide adequate representations of the familiar concepts of weak, strong and global supervenience. The primitivist representations of these concepts can be applied to provide adequate interpretations of speciflc supervenience theses which will be considered. Moreover the modal primitivist is no better and no worse placed than the genuine modal realist to present supervenience as a simple and unifled notion. Therefore, Lewis is unjustified in claiming that a genuine modal realist approach to the analysis of the concept of supervenience is superior to a modal primitivist approach.