Reviving Psychophysical Supervenience
ABSTRACT: Many philosophers have lost their enthusiasm for the concept of supervenience in the philosophy of mind. This is largely due to the fact that, as Jaegwon Kim has shown, familiar versions of supervenience describe relations of mere property covariation without capturing the idea of dependence. Since the dependence of the mental on the physical is a necessary requirement for even the weakest version of physicalism, it would seem that existing forms of supervenience cannot achieve that for which they were designed. My aim is to revive the concept of supervenience. I argue that if we construe supervenience along Davidsonian lines — as a relation connecting predicates rather than properties — then it avoids the shortcomings of the more familiar varieties.
When it first appeared on the scene in the philosophy of mind, the concept of supervenience was warmly embraced. Supervenience was thought to capture the idea of dependence without reduction and thus promised to provide a useful framework for discussions of mental causation, phenomenal experience, and, more generally, the relation between the mental and the physical. Since then a great deal has changed. Much careful work has been done to show that philosophical applications of supervenience do not, in fact, achieve what they were thought to. For example, Jaegwon Kim, whose name is closely associated with the concept, has shown convincingly that the standard formulations of supervenience in the philosophy of mind (weak, strong, and global) do not capture the idea of psychophysical dependence. (1) Many philosophers believed that supervenience could express a form of physicalism, but since the concept of dependence is a minimal req...
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...dson, ‘Thinking Causes’, in Mental Causation, ed. John Heil and Alfred Mele (Oxford, Clarendon Press: 1993) p. 13.
(4) Donald Davidson, "Mental Events," in Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) p. 214 (emphasis added).
(5) Davidson, "Radical Interpretation," in Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) p. 137.
(6) Donald Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, op. cit., p. 214.
(7) For example, see Simon Evnine, Donald Davidson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) pp. 69-70.
(8) Davidson, "Mental Events," op. cit., p. 214.
(9) For example see, Terence Horgan, "From Supervenience to Superdupervenience: Meeting the Demands of a Material World," Mind 102 (1993) pp. 554-586; Thomas Grimes, "Supervenience, Determination, and Dependency," Philosophical Studies 62 (1991) pp. 81-92.
There are 4 topics represented in the analysis of evaluating a community to determine the PPC. The most important is the fire department, which accounts for 50 percent. The next is water supply, which accounts for 40 percent. The next is receiving and handling fire alarms, which accounts for 10 percent. The last is divergence, which isn’t worth a percentage but can alter a score based on the difference between the protection provided by the fire department and the water supply (Excelsior Springs FSA). Since the Excelsior Springs Fire Department isn’t in control of the dispatching o...
The philosophical theory of dualism holds that mind and body are two separate entities. While dualism presupposes that the two ‘substances’ may interact, it contrasts physicalism by refusing to denote correlation between body and mind as proof of identity. Comparing the two theories, dualism’s invulnerable proof of the existence of qualia manages to evade arguments from physicalism. While a common argument against qualia—non-physical properties defined in Jackson’s Knowledge Argument—targets the unsound nature of epiphenomenalism, this claim is not fatal to the theory of dualism as it contains claims of causation and fails to stand resolute to the conceivability of philosophical zombies. This essay argues that epiphenomenalism, while often designated as a weakness when present in an argument, can remain in valid arguments from qualia.
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With this notion, Clark and Chalmers try to establish an interactive cognitive link between humans and external entities, thus showing how it is the system between the two makes up the mind - both the internal and external components are vital parts of the mind. In this essay, I shall oppose this view by revealing firstly, a fallacy and Clark and Chal...
On the other hand, on “My Last Duchess”, the speaker is a Duke who is going to be remarried. As the speaker shows his new wife’s father a painting of his previous wife he describes how she was like. Unlike the previous poem, this one clearly depicts the speaker as a monster. He had his wife murdered for what comes across as fairly innocent crimes. In the following lines he states;
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Physicalism, or the idea that everything, including the mind, is physical is one of the major groups of theories about how the nature of the mind, alongside dualism and monism. This viewpoint strongly influences many ways in which we interact with our surrounding world, but it is not universally supported. Many objections have been raised to various aspects of the physicalist viewpoint with regards to the mind, due to apparent gaps in its explanatory power. One of these objections is Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument. This argument claims to show that even if one has all of the physical information about a situation, they can still lack knowledge about what it’s like to be in that situation. This is a problem for physicalism because physicalism claims that if a person knows everything physical about a situation they should know everything about a situation. There are, however, responses to the Knowledge Argument that patch up physicalism to where the Knowledge Argument no longer holds.
Gioia, Dana, and X.J. Kennedy. "My Last Duchess." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, Compact Edition, Interactive Edition. 5th ed. New York: Pearson; Longman Publishing, 2007. 432-433. Print.
The purpose of this essay is to analyze and compare and contrast the two paired poems “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning and “My Ex-Husband” by Gabriel Spera to find the similarities presented within the pairs. Despite the monumental time difference between “My Last Duchess” and “My Ex-Husband”, throughout both poems you will see that somebody is wronged by someone they thought was a respectable person and this all comes about by viewing a painting on the wall or picture on a shelf.
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This paper aims to endorse physicalism over dualism by means of Smart’s concept of identity theory. Smart’s article Sensations and the Brain provides a strong argument for identity theory and accounts for many of it primary objections. Here I plan to first discuss the main arguments for physicalism over dualism, then more specific arguments for identity theory, and finish with further criticisms of identity theory.
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Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society: The development of higher mental processes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press