Concepts of Supervenience

Abstract

We think of the world around us not as a mere assemblage of unrelated objects, events, and facts, but as constituting a system, something that shows structure, and whose constituents are connected with one another in significant ways. This view of the world seems fundamental to our scheme of things; it is reflected in the commonplace assumption that things that happen in one place can make a difference to things that happen in another in a way that enables us to make sense of one thing in terms of another, infer information about one thing from information about another, or affect one thing by affecting another. Central to this idea of interconnectedness of things is a notion of dependence (or, its converse, determination): things are connected with one another in that whether something exists, or what properties it has, is dependent on, or determined by, what other things exist and what kinds of things they are. It is in virtue of these dependency or determinative relationships that the world can be made intelligible; and by exploiting them we are able to intervene in the course of events and alter it to suit our wishes. Activities like explanation, prediction, and control would make little sense for a world devoid of such connections. The idea that real connections exist and the idea that the world is intelligible and controllable are arguably an equivalent idea. Causation is a preeminent example of what I am calling determinative or dependency relations; apart from those that are logically based, such as entailment, it is the only explicitly recognized and widely discussed relation of this kind. Causes determine their effects, and effects are dependent, for their existence and properties, on their causes. It is not for nothing that