Introduction

Confusion Supervenes

Supervenience is a basically useful notion, but ‘supervene’ has become philosophers' jargon, waved like a wand to dazzle. ‘Supervene’ and ‘supervenience’, having been coined in their current philosophical sense around 1950, are now standard philosophical vocabulary. ‘Supervene’ in this use is purely a term of art, standing for several different concepts, as documented by Teller [p], Kim [cs], and me [s]. Yet the current mode is to take for granted that we all mean the same thing by ‘supervenience’. It is treated as though it were an everyday word with an ordinary, well-understood meaning we all intuitively grasp. The various technical senses would then be so many proposed explications of the assumed ordinary sense. But this common practice gets it upside-down. There is no ordinary philosophical sense of ‘supervenience’. There are only technical senses; their logical connections are complex. Here I will try once again to disentangle some of them.

A Relation between Families of Properties

A central confusion, or at any rate diversity, in the way ‘supervenience’ has come to be bandied about concerns the terms of the supervenience relation. As originally introduced, supervenience related two families of properties of the same type. For example, the mental properties of people might be held to supervene upon their physical properties. If the supervenient family is narrowed down to a single property, that's no problem.