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Robust Supervenience and Emergence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Alexander Rueger
Alexander Rueger*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta
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Abstract

Non-reductive physicalists have made a number of attempts to provide the relation of supervenience between levels of properties with enough bite to analyze interesting cases without at the same time losing the relation's acceptability for the physicalist. I criticize some of these proposals and suggest an alternative supplementation of the supervenience relation by imposing a requirement of robustness which is motivated by the notion of structural stability familiar from dynamical systems theory. Robust supervenience, I argue, captures what the non-reductive physicalist wants from supervenience; most importantly, it provides a natural background for reconstructing the notion of (diachronic) property emergence in a way acceptable to physicalists.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 67 , Issue 3 , September 2000 , pp. 466 - 489
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5, Canada.

‡

For help with earlier versions of this paper I thank Bob Batterman, Alex Byrne, Martin Carrier, Mohan Matthen, Glenn Parsons, Dave Sharp, and two anonymous referees.

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