Abstract

The introductory section discusses supervenience and the role it plays in formulating contemporary physicalism. The section concludes with the definition of local supervenience used by Kim in the causal-exclusion argument. The second section outlines an abstract model for the analysis of supervenience, associating total mental states with total states of the nervous system. It is argued that Kim’s formulation confuses two orders of necessity: a metaphysical necessity attaching to the supervenience of the total mental state, and a nomological necessity attaching to the correlation of particular elements of the concurrent physical and mental states. A central idea is the degree of resolution of the description of the state of the nervous system. This serves as a metaphor for the idea of multiplelevels of physical description, and in the third section it is argued that any formulation of supervenience that was attached to a particular level of description would risk error if changes at a more fundamental level of the subvening base proved to be significant for supervenience. In the fourth section it is argued that the problem of levels of properties and description cannot be avoided by a retreat from local to global supervenience. Loewer’s notion of a duplicate world may help, but an alternative weaker formulation is proposed that does avoid the difficulty.