Humean Supervenience Research Articles

On What We Know About Chance

The ‘Principal Principle’ states, roughly, that one's subjective probability for a proposition should conform to one's beliefs about that proposition's objective chance of coming true. David Lewis has argued (i) that this principle provides the defining role for chance; (ii) that it conflicts with his reductionist thesis of Humean supervenience, and so must be replaced by an amended version that avoids the conflict; hence (iii) that nothing perfectly deserves the name ‘chance’, although something can come close enough by playing the role picked out by the amended principle. We show that in fact there must be ‘chances’ that perfectly play what Lewis takes to be the defining role. But this is not the happy conclusion it might seem, since these ‘chances’ behave too strangely to deserve the name. The lesson is simple: much more than the Principal Principle—more to the point, much more than the connection between chance and credence—informs our understanding of objective chance.1Introduction2Preliminaries3Undermining futures and the New Principle4The Old Principle rescued?5The New Bug6Conclusion

Reality and Humean Supervenience: Essays on the Philosophy of David Lewis

Book Review| April 01 2003 Reality and Humean Supervenience: Essays on the Philosophy of David Lewis Gerhard Preyer and Frank Siebelt, editors, Reality and Humean Supervenience: Essays on the Philosophy of David Lewis. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Pp xiii, 245. Daniel Nolan Daniel Nolan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2003) 112 (2): 263–266. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-112-2-263 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Daniel Nolan; Reality and Humean Supervenience: Essays on the Philosophy of David Lewis. The Philosophical Review 1 April 2003; 112 (2): 263–266. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-112-2-263 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsThe Philosophical Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Cornell University2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reality and Humean Supervenience: Essays on the Philosophy of David LewisGerhard Preyer and Frank Siebelt, editors Studies in Epistemology and Cognitive Theory Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001, xii + 243 pp., $27.95 paper

Reality and Humean Supervenience: Essays on the Philosophy of David LewisGerhard Preyer and Frank Siebelt, editors Studies in Epistemology and Cognitive Theory Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001, xii + 243 pp., $27.95 paper - Volume 42 Issue 2

Humean supervenience and best-system laws

David Lewis has proposed an analysis of lawhood in terms of membership of a system of regularities optimizing simplicity and strength in information content. This article studies his proposal against the broader background of the project of Humean supervenience. In particular, I claim that, in Lewis's account of lawhood, his intuition about small deviations from a given law in nearby worlds (in order to avoid backtracking and epiphenomena) leads to the conclusion that laws do not support (certain) counterfactuals and do not bestow nomic necessity on (certain) facts induced by these laws. Support of counterfactuals and nomic necessity, however, are widely held to be important aspects of the concept of lawhood. In my view, therefore, it is not possible to abandon these criteria in any satisfactory analysis of the notion of laws of nature. In a final section, I suggest that the whole project of Humean supervenience is misleading. It does not sufficiently take notice of the important role that reasoning about contrary-to-fact situations plays in modern scientific practice.

The rotating disk argument and Humean supervenience: cutting the Gordian knot

Advocates of Humean supervenience have been at pains to defend their view against the homogeneous rotating disk argument. Here I will argue that keeping clearly in mind the distinction between perdurance and endurance accounts of persistence clarifies and resolves the dispute. I will close by interpreting Hawley (1999) as suggesting that non-supervening relations can do the work of endurance for a perdurance theorist. The claim of Humean supervenience is that everything supervenes upon the space-time distribution of local intrinsic qualities – for short, everything Hume-supervenes. A concise statement of the argument in question proceeds thus:

Scala and the Spinning Spheres

I have argued that contemporary humeans face a trilemma: either (i) give up temporal parts. (ii) deny the humean supervenience of causal relations, or (iii) deny the possibility of there being a difference between rotating and nonrotating homogeneous spheres. Mark Scala (“Homogeneous Simples”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 64, 2002) describes an interesting class of seemingly possible objects, spinning and stationary simples; and argues their possibility undermines my argument. I argue that it does not. And 1 conclude with a more general assessment of the status of objections to humeanism from the possibility of homogeneous objects in motion.

Who's afraid of undermining?

The Principal Principle (PP) says that,for any proposition A, given any admissible evidenceand the proposition that the chance of A is x%,one's conditional credence in A should be x%. HumeanSupervenience (HS) claims that, among possible worldslike ours, no two differ without differing inthe spacetime-point-by-spacetime-point arrangement oflocal properties. David Lewis (1986b, 1994a)has argued that PP contradicts HS, and thevalidity of his argument has been endorsed byBigelow et al. (1993),Thau (1994),Hall (1994),Strevens (1995),Ismael (1996),Hoefer (1997), and Black (1998).Against this consensus, I argue thatPP might not contradict HS: Lewis'sargument is invalid, and every attempt – withina broad class of attempts – toamend the argument fails.

Humeanism without Humean Supervenience: A Projectivist Account of Laws and Possibilities

Acceptance of Humean Supervenience and thereductive Humean analyses that entail it leadsto a litany of inadequately explained conflictswith our intuitions regarding laws andpossibilities. However, the non-reductiveHumeanism developed here, on which law claimsare understood as normative rather than factstating, can accommodate those intuitions. Rational constraints on such norms provide aset of consistency relations that ground asemantics formulated in terms offactual-normative worlds, solving theFrege-Geach problem of construing unassertedcontexts. This set of factual-normative worldsincludes exactly the intuitive sets ofnomologically possible worlds associated witheach possible set of laws. The extension ofthe semantics to counterfactual and subjunctiveconditionals is sketched. Potential objectionsinvolving subjectivity, mind-dependence, andnon-factuality are discussed.

Miracles: metaphysics and modality

It is argued that miracles are best understood as natural events with supernatural causes and that such causal interaction is logically possible. Such miracles may, or may not, involve violations of natural laws. If violations of laws are possible, Humean supervenience views of laws are best avoided. Where miracles violate laws, it shows that what is naturally impossible may be actual and what is naturally necessary may not be actual. Whether or not miracles actually occur, this demonstrates that the nomic modalities differ from the logical. The theory contrasts favourably with competitors and allows, contrary to an interpretation of Aquinas, that Creation would have been a miracle.

Undermining Undermined: Why Humean Supervenience Never Needed to Be Debugged (Even If It's a Necessary Truth)

The existence of “undermining futures” appears to show that a contradiction can be deduced from the conjunction of Humean supervenience (HS) about chance and the Principal Principle. A number of strategies for rescuing HS from this problem have been proposed recently. In this paper, a novel way of defending HS from the threat is presented, and it is argued that this defense has advantages not shared by others. In particular, it requires no revisionism about chance, and it is equally available to defenders of HS who hold HS to be necessary and those who hold it to be contingent.

Humean supervenience and rotating homogeneous matter

Humean supervenience (HS) is the thesis that everything supervenes upon the spatiotemporal distribution of local intrinsic qualities. A recent threat to HS, originating in thought experiments by Armstrong and Kripke, claims that the mere possibility of rotating homogeneous discs proves HS false. I argue that the rotating disc argument (RDA) fails. If I am right, Humeans needn’t abandon or alter HS to make sense of rotating homogeneous discs. Homogeneous discs, as necessarily understood by RDA, are not the sorts of things in which we should believe. These discs do not belong in our ontology—n ot because there is a problem with their homogeneity, but (surprisingly) because there is a problem with their rotation. RDA is shown to be a kind of parody of classic arguments for spatial substantivalism.

Undermining Undermined: Why Humean Supervenience Never Needed to Be Debugged (Even If It's a Necessary Truth)

Undermining Undermined: Why Humean Supervenience Never Needed to Be Debugged (Even If It's a Necessary Truth)

Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology

Introduction 1. New Work for a theory of universals 2. Putnam's paradox 3. Against structural universals 4. A comment on Armstrong and Forrest 5. Extrinsic properties 6. Defining 'intrinsic' (with Rae Langton) 7. Finkish dispositions 8. Noneism or Allism? 9. Many, but almost one 10. Casati and Varzi on holes (with Stephanie Lewis) 11. Rearrangement of particles: reply to Lowe 12. Armstrong on combinatorial possibility 13. A world of truthmakers? 14. Maudlin and modal mystery 15. Humean supervenience debugged 16. Psychophysical and theoretical identifications 17. What experience teaches 18. Reduction of mind 19. Should a materialist believe in Qualia? 20. Naming the colours 21. Percepts and color mosaics in visual experience 22. Individuation by acquaintance and by stipulation 23. Why conditionalize? 24. What puzzling Pierre does not believe 25. Elusive knowledge Index.

Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology

Introduction 1. New Work for a theory of universals 2. Putnam's paradox 3. Against structural universals 4. A comment on Armstrong and Forrest 5. Extrinsic properties 6. Defining 'intrinsic' (with Rae Langton) 7. Finkish dispositions 8. Noneism or Allism? 9. Many, but almost one 10. Casati and Varzi on holes (with Stephanie Lewis) 11. Rearrangement of particles: reply to Lowe 12. Armstrong on combinatorial possibility 13. A world of truthmakers? 14. Maudlin and modal mystery 15. Humean supervenience debugged 16. Psychophysical and theoretical identifications 17. What experience teaches 18. Reduction of mind 19. Should a materialist believe in Qualia? 20. Naming the colours 21. Percepts and color mosaics in visual experience 22. Individuation by acquaintance and by stipulation 23. Why conditionalize? 24. What puzzling Pierre does not believe 25. Elusive knowledge Index.

Persistence and non-supervenient relations

I claim that, if persisting objects have temporal parts, then there are non-supervenient relations between those temporal parts. These are relations which are not determined by intrinsic properties of the temporal parts. I use the Kripke-Armstrong 'rotating homogeneous disc' argument in order to establish this claim, and in doing so I defend and develop that argument. This involves a discussion of instantaneous velocity, and of the causes and effects of rotation. Finally, I compare alternative responses to the rotating disc argument, and consider the implications of my arguments for the doctrines of Humean Supervenience and unrestricted mereology.

Temporal Parts Unmotivated

In debate about the nature of persistence over time, the view that material objects endure has played the role of champion and the view that they perdure has played the role of challenger.' As in other contests, the champion's job is merely to defend her title, whereas the challenger's job is to prove herself worthy. I have no view about how these roles came to be assigned; but the historical fact is that perdurantists have traditionally borne the proverbial burden of proof in this debate. It has fallen to the perdurantists rather than the endurantists to motivate their view, to provide reasons for accepting it that override whatever initial presumption there is against it. Perdurantists have sought to discharge their burden in several ways. For example, perdurantism has been recommended on the grounds that: (i) it solves several of the puzzles that raise the problem of material constitution; (ii) it is (at least) suggested by the special theory of relativity (hereafter SR); (iii) it is the only view that makes sense out of the possibility of intrinsic change; (iv) it is the only view consistent with the doctrine of Humean supervenience; and (v) it makes better sense than its competitor out of the possibility of fission. These are the primary and most powerful claims that have been made on behalf of perdurantism.2 They are

Humean supervenience and enduring things

Humean supervenience and enduring things

Undermining and Admissibility

Our best physical theories seem to tell us that the world is an objectively chancy place. Some possible futures have some chance of being actual, and this is the most that can be said. More knowledge about the way the world is now and what the laws are won't yield complete information about what will be. Of course, our best theories may be wrong, but they are not wrong merely because they advert to the notion of objective chance. Quantum mechanics may be incorrect because it postulates entities or properties that there aren't; it might even be wrong because it makes no sense; but it isn't wrong because the notion of chance it so freely makes use of makes no sense. Whether our best theories are to be believed or not, they force upon us the conceptual possibility of objectively chancy events. Given this, one might wonder whether the totality of facts about the world which aren't about chance determines the chances, whether matters of chance supervene on matters of non-chance. We do not learn about the chances directly, rather we make hypotheses about what the chances are based on information about relative frequencies. Induction justifies us in thinking that the relative frequencies we have observed will continue throughout world history. But if supervenience fails we have reason-in addition to general worries about i.nduction-to be sceptical concerning our knowledge of the chances. For if supervenience fails, the correctness of our views on what there is and how it behaves won't suffice to determine the chances. So one reason to hope for a successful reductive analysis of chance is that it would show that chance does supervene on matters of non-chance. One way that matters of chance might supervene on matters of non-chance is through Humean supervenience, the view that all supervenes on local matters of particular fact. David Lewis is the view's architect, but he has also given reason to think that chance cannot supervene in a Humean manner (Lewis 1994). He begins with a vague worry that does not itself force the Humean to give up hope. However, by adding an extremely plausible premise concerning the relationship between chance and credence, he turns the worry into a proper argument. It has gone unnoticed that the trouble Lewis raises is not restricted to Humean reductions of chance. The argument-if sound-destroys the hope of virtually any reductive analysis of chance. Indeed, the argument even raises difficulties for some views according to which chance is brute and unanalysable. The primary purposes of this paper are to show how broad the scope of the argument is, and then to offer a response.

Correcting The Guide to Objective Chance

In his A Subjectivist's Guide to Objective Chance, David Lewis argues persuasively that a certain relationship holds between reasonable credence and objective chance (I 980).l Both items involve varieties of probability: in the case of credence, we use subjective probability to describe gradations in degree of belief; in the case of chance, we use objective probability to describe irreducibly indeterministic processes (e.g., radioactive decay). While these two uses are not to be conflated, Lewis points out an important connection between them: roughly, rationality requires conforming one's subjective credence in a proposition to one's estimate of the objective chance that the proposition will come true. As a precise statement of this connection, Lewis offers his Principle-only to find that it conflicts with his cherished thesis of reductionist metaphysics dubbed Humean Supervenience. So we seem to face a dilemma: either we abandon an attractive and plausible principle relating credence and chance, or we give up the reductionist thesis. Wrong. The Principal Principle (hereafter: the Principle) does not adequately formulate the connection between credence and chance. Close inspection reveals that it embodies a crucial oversight for which there is, happily, a natural repair. Undertaking this repair, we arrive at a New Principle which all parties, regardless of their metaphysical commitments, should find compelling. This New Principle functions much better than the Old: it is more precise, holds without qualification, explains the initial plausibility of the Old Principle while yielding that Principle as an approximation, is perfectly immune to the problem raised in Lewis (1980) and provides an analysis of an important range of cases about which the Old Principle fell silent. In what follows, I rehearse the Old Principle together with familiar problems confronting it, paying special attention to the notion of admissibility required for its formulation. This notion is, ultimately, dispensable: where inadmissible information was taken to break the connection between credence and chance, I show that on the contrary there is a perfectly straightforward way to incorporate such information into the connection. Following this line of thought leads directly to the New Principle. All of which will require some background, which follows.

Supervenience and Singular Causal Statements

In his recent book, Causation: A Realistic Approach, Michael Tooley discusses the following thesis, which he calls the ‘thesis of the Humean Supervenience of Causal Relations’:(T) The truth values of all singular causal statements are logically determined by the truth values of statements of causal laws, together with the truth values of non-causal statements about particulars (p. 182).(T) represents one version of the ‘Humean’ idea that there is no more factual content to the claim that two particular events are causally connected than that they occur, instantiate some law or regularity, and perhaps bear some appropriate non-causal (e.g. spatio-temporal) to each other. This is an idea that is tacitly or explicitly assumed in most familiar accounts of singular causal statements. For example (T) is assumed by many probabilistic theories of singular causal statements, by theories which attempt to analyse singular causal statements in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, and, as I shall argue below, by David Lewis' counterfactual theory.