Philosophy
The Concept of Supervenience in Philosophy of Mind
Quick fact
The term 'supervenience' comes from the Latin 'supervenire', meaning 'to come upon' or 'to be added', and was popularized in the 1970s by philosopher Jaegwon Kim.
Why this is interesting
Imagine two universes that are exactly the same down to the last atom. Could one have minds and the other not? Supervenience says no.
Read the full explanation
Understanding The Concept of Supervenience in Philosophy of Mind
Supervenience is a way to talk about the relationship between two sets of properties—let's say mental ones and physical ones. The core idea is simple: if two things (like two brains, or two possible worlds) are exactly alike in their physical properties, then they must be exactly alike in their mental properties. In other words, there cannot be a mental difference without a physical difference. Think of it like a projection: the physical facts determine the mental facts, but the mental isn't necessarily reducible to the physical. For example, a pain sensation might arise from different physical states in different organisms (like a human and an octopus), yet any change in the pain must correspond to some change in the physical state. This is what philosophers mean by 'mental properties supervene on physical properties'.
A deeper explanation
Supervenience provides a precise way to formulate physicalism, the view that everything is ultimately physical. If mental properties supervene on physical properties, then the mental is in a sense dependent on the physical, but this doesn't require us to say that mental properties are identical to physical properties or that they can be translated into physical terms. This makes supervenience attractive because it avoids the pitfalls of both strict reductionism (which might fail because mental states can be 'multiply realizable'—realized by different physical states) and substance dualism (which holds that mind and matter are separate substances). The philosopher Jaegwon Kim formalized supervenience into several versions, the most common being 'strong supervenience' and 'weak supervenience'. Strong supervenience says that for any two possible worlds, if they are physically identical, they are mentally identical. Weak supervenience only applies within a single world: any two individuals in the same world with the same physical properties must have the same mental properties. Strong supervenience is the more robust claim and is often used to capture the idea of global dependence. However, philosophers have debated whether supervenience is enough to explain everything we want from physicalism, particularly the issue of mental causation—how mental states can cause physical effects without being reducible to physical causes. This has led to the famous 'exclusion problem'. Understanding supervenience is thus essential for anyone delving into the philosophy of mind, as it is a central tool for analyzing the relationship between mind and body.