Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Varieties of Supervenience
- Supervenience: Model Theory of Metaphysics?
- “Global” Supervenient Determination: Too Permissive?
- Weak Supervenience Supervenes
- The Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Supervenience
- Reduction in the Mind of God
- Psychophysical Supervenience, Dependency, and Reduction
- Supervenience Redux
- Nonreducible Supervenient Causation
- Physicalism, Supervenience, and Dependence
- An Argument for Strong Supervenience
- Arguments for Supervenience and Physical Realization
- Supervenience and the Essences of Events
- How Does Ontology Supervene on What There Is?
- Supervenience and Intentionality
- Supervenience, Coherence, and Trustworthiness
- Does Truth Supervene on Evidence?
- Index
An Argument for Strong Supervenience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Varieties of Supervenience
- Supervenience: Model Theory of Metaphysics?
- “Global” Supervenient Determination: Too Permissive?
- Weak Supervenience Supervenes
- The Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Supervenience
- Reduction in the Mind of God
- Psychophysical Supervenience, Dependency, and Reduction
- Supervenience Redux
- Nonreducible Supervenient Causation
- Physicalism, Supervenience, and Dependence
- An Argument for Strong Supervenience
- Arguments for Supervenience and Physical Realization
- Supervenience and the Essences of Events
- How Does Ontology Supervene on What There Is?
- Supervenience and Intentionality
- Supervenience, Coherence, and Trustworthiness
- Does Truth Supervene on Evidence?
- Index
Summary
Jerry Fodor enunciates the physicalist credo thus:
I suppose that sooner or later physicists will complete the catalogue that they have been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm, and charge will perhaps appear on their list. But aboutness surely won't. Intentionality simply doesn't go that deep. It is hard to see in the face of this consideration, how one can be a Realist about intentionality without also being, to some extent or other, a Reductionist. If the semantic and the intentional are real properties of things, it must be in virtue of their identity (or perhaps supervenience on?) properties that are themselves neither intentional nor semantic.
Fodor is claiming that if intentional predicates – for example, ‘believes that tigers have stripes’ and ‘desires to see a tiger’ – express genuine properties, then these properties must either be identical to or supervene on the properties of basic physics; that is, the properties in the physicists' completed catalogue or complexes composed of such properties. A thoroughgoing physicalist holds that all genuine properties, or at least all properties that play a role in science, are identical to or supervene on physical properties. Of course, most philosophers nowadays do not think that psychological properties (intentional properties among them) are identical to physical properties (or complexes of physical properties). Their view, which it is fair to say is now the received view, is that psychological properties either are not real or supervene on basic physical properties.
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- SupervenienceNew Essays, pp. 218 - 225Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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