Abstract
It is widely accepted that supervenience is a minimal commitment of physicalism. In this article, however, I aim to argue that physicalism should be exempted from the supervenience requirement. My arguments rely on a parallel between ontological dependence and causal dependence. Since causal dependence does not require causal determination, ontological dependence should not require ontological determination either. Moreover, my approach has a significant theoretical advantage: if physicalism is not committed to supervenience, then the metaphysical possibility of zombies—which is still wide open after all these years—would pose no challenge to physicalism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In supervenience-based formulations of physicalism, the notion of supervenience is standardly understood as supervenience with metaphysical necessity rather than necessity in a weaker sense (such as nomological necessity). In the rest of this article, when I use the term ‘necessity’ without qualification, I always mean metaphysical necessity.
Here ‘ontological determination’ is interchangeable with ‘ontological necessitation’. To say that X is ontologically determined by Y is to say that X is ontologically determined with metaphysical necessity by Y.
According to Kim, A-properties strongly supervene on B-properties if and only if for any possible worlds w1 and w2 and any individuals x in w1 and y in w2, if x is B-indiscernible from y, then x is A-indiscernible from y (see Kim 1993).
I’d like to note, however, that philosophers have debated over whether the lone molecule problem raises a serious challenge to physicalism (see Kim 1993). Moreover, it is worth mentioning that the lone molecule problem for global supervenience could be easily adapted as a corresponding problem for individual supervenience (Paull and Sider 1992). Suppose that Oscar and Twin Oscar are physically indistinguishable except that Twin Oscar has an additional molecule in his brain. Suppose further that the two individuals are mentally different: while Oscar is happy, Twin Oscar is depressed. Physicalism seems to be false in this scenario, although individual supervenience is not violated.
Some philosophers even equate ontological dependence with ontological determination. For example, Kim says that “it is customary to associate supervenience with the idea of dependence or determination: if the mental supervenes on the physical, the mental is dependent on the physical, or the physical determines the mental, roughly in the sense that the mental nature of a thing is entirely fixed by its physical natures” (Kim 1998, p. 11).
Water not just supervenes on H2O, but is also identical with H2O. Here I am only concerned with the weaker relationship of supervenience for my purposes.
completeness is not the view that every effect has a sufficient physical cause. Suppose that a higher-level event H doesn’t causally depend upon any physical event (at some time t)—rather, H is caused by another higher-level event H' at time t. This doesn’t violate completeness. Moreover, this case could be allowed by physicalism if H and H' ontologically depend on physical entities. See Zhong (2014) for more discussion.
For the purposes of this article, we can simply assume that physicalism requires the causal completeness of physics, whereas I have argued elsewhere that physicalism could still be true even if the physical domain is causally incomplete (Zhong 2020).
A sufficient cause doesn’t have to be the only cause. In a case of causal overdetermination, there is more than one sufficient cause of the same effect.
Since laws of nature (including physical laws, chemical laws, biological laws, etc.) apply to phenomena that are causally and diachronically connected, laws of nature are typically regarded as causal laws.
Although contingentism about causal laws is the mainstream view, some philosophers contend that causal laws are metaphysically necessary. They typically appeal to a dispositional account of properties, according to which properties are individuated in terms of their causal or nomic roles (see Shoemaker 1980; Bird 2007). However, this conception of properties is highly controversial. Phenomenal properties and configurational physical properties, for example, don’t seem to have dispositional essences. Moreover, even if causal laws are metaphysically necessary, the causes may still fail to necessitate the effects, provided that causal laws are indeterministic.
Kment’s notion of ‘laws of metaphysics’ has roughly the same meaning as my notion of ‘ontological laws’. And I use the term ‘metaphysical laws’ in a broader sense to cover both causal laws and ontological laws.
In the literature, the term ‘a nomologically possible world’ is sometimes used in a different sense, referring to a world that has the same causal laws as the actual world does.
Consider an example of constitution. The statue of Venus de Milo is ultimately constituted by microphysical particles with a specific configuration. If anything is constituted in the same way, it would be a statue of Venus de Milo. Thus, being a statue of Venus de Milo individually supervenes on its microphysical configuration. However, the model of constitution, as a case of individual supervenience, is not suitable for characterizing the mental-physical relationship. I owe this example to an anonymous reviewer.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to address this issue.
Some philosophers consider the possible scenario “in which an indeterministic physical state P1 has two possible emergent outcomes, and these emergent states, in turn, have a possible physical effect in common” (O’Connor and Wong 2005, p. 668). In this case, the causal completeness of physics is violated. But for my purposes, I don’t have to deny completeness.
References
Audi, P. (2012). Grounding: Toward a theory of the in-virtue-of relation. Journal of Philosophy, 112, 685–711.
Balaguer, M. (2014). Anti-metaphysicalism, necessity, and temporal ontology. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 89, 145–167.
Bennett, K. (2008). Exclusion again. In J. Hohwy & J. Kallestrup (Eds.), Being reduced: New essays on reduction, explanation, and causation (pp. 280–305). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bird, A. (2007). Nature’s metaphysics: Laws and properties. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cameron, R. (2007). The contingency of composition. Philosophical Studies, 136, 99–121.
Chalmers, D. (1996). The conscious mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
Chalmers, D. (2010). The two-dimensional argument against materialism. In D. Chalmers (Ed.), The character of consciousness (pp. 141–205). New York: Oxford University Press.
Crane, T. (2001). Elements of mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ellis, B. (2001). Scientific essentialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gardner, T. (2005). Supervenience physicalism: Meeting the demands of determination and explanation. Philosophical Papers, 34, 189–208.
Gibb, S. C. (2010). Closure principles and the laws of conservation of energy and momentum. Dialectica, 64, 363–384.
Heil, J. (1998). Supervenience deconstructed. European Journal of Philosophy, 6, 146–155.
Horgan, T. (1993). From superveniencet to superdupervenience: Meeting the demands of a material world. Mind, 102, 555–585.
Jackson, F. (1998). From metaphysics to ethics: A defense of conceptual analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kim, J. (1993). Mind and supervenience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kim, J. (1998). Mind in a physical world. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kim, J. (2005). Physicalism, or something near enough. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kment, B. (2014). Modality and explanatory reasoning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Leuenberger, S. (2013). Grounding and necessity. Inquiry, 57, 151–174.
Levine, J. (1993). Materialism and qualia: The explanatory gap. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64, 354–361.
Lewis, D. (1983). New work for a theory of universals. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 61, 343–377.
Lewis, D. (1986). Postscripts to ‘causation’. In D. Lewis (Ed.), Philosophical papers, Vol. II (pp. 172–213). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Loar, B. (2002). Phenomenal states (second version). In D. Chalmers (Ed.), Philosophy of mind: Classical and contemporary readings (pp. 296–311). New York: Oxford University Press.
Mackie, J. (1974). The cement of the universe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McLaughlin, B. P. (1995). Varieties of supervenience. In E. Savellos & U. Yalcin (Eds.), Supervenience: New essays (pp. 16–59). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McLaughlin, B. P. (2001). In defense of new wave materialism. In C. Gillett & B. Loewer (Eds.), Physicalism and its discontents (pp. 319–330). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Melnyk, A. (2003). A physicalist manifesto: Thoroughly modern materialism. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Menzies, P. (2017). Counterfactual theories of causation. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/causation-counterfactual/.
Miller, K. (2009). Defending contingentism in metaphysics. Dialectica, 62, 23–49.
Montero, B. (2013). Must physicalism imply the supervenience of the mental on the physical? Journal of Philosophy, 110, 93–110.
Montero, B., & Brown, C. (2018). Making room for a this-worldly physicalism. Topoi, 37, 523–532.
Nolan, D. (2011). The extent of metaphysical necessity. Philosophical Perspectives, 25, 313–339.
O’Connor, T., & Wong, H. Y. (2005). The metaphysics of emergence. Noûs, 39, 658–678.
Papineau, D. (1993). Philosophical naturalism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Papineau, D. (2001). The rise of physicalism. In C. Gillett & B. Loewer (Eds.), Physicalism and its discontents (pp. 3–36). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Paul, L. A., & Hall, N. (2013). Causation: A user’s guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Paull, C., & Sider, T. (1992). In defense of global supervenience. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 52, 833–854.
Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of ‘meaning’. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 7, 131–193.
Rosen, G. (2010). Metaphysical dependence: Grounding and reduction. In B. Hale & A. Hoffmann (Eds.), Modality: Metaphysics, logic, and epistemology (pp. 109–135). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rosen, G. (2017). Ground by law. Philosophical Issues, 27, 279–301.
Salmon, W. (1984). Scientific explanation and the causal structure of the world. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Salmon, W. (1998). Causality and explanation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schaffer, J. (2017). Laws for metaphysical explanation. Philosophical Issues, 27, 302–321.
Searle, J. (1959). Determinables and the notion of resemblance. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 33, 141–158.
Shoemaker, S. (1980). Causality and properties. In P. van Inwagen (Ed.), Time and cause: Essays presented to Richard Taylor (pp. 109–135). Dordrecht: Reidel.
Wilson, J. (2005). Supervenience-based formulations of physicalism. Noûs, 39, 426–459.
Wilson, J. (2006). On characterizing the physical. Philosophical Studies, 131, 61–99.
Witmer, G. (2001). Sufficiency claims and physicalism: A formulation. In C. Gillett & B. Loewer (Eds.), Physicalism and its discontents (pp. 57–73). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Woodward, J. (2003). Making things happen: A theory of causal explanation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Zhong, L. (2014). Sophisticated exclusion and sophisticated causation. Journal of Philosophy, 111, 361–380.
Zhong, L. (2016). Physicalism, psychism, and phenomenalism. Journal of Philosophy, 113, 572–590.
Zhong, L. (2020). Taking emergentism seriously. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 98, 31–46.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Ivan Mayerhofer and an anonymous reviewer for this journal for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank Asher Jiang, Chang Liu, Yuan Ren, Zhiheng Tang, and other participants of the Analytic Philosophy Workshop at Sun Yat-Sen University and the Workshop on Physicalism and Panpsychism at Renmin University.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Zhong, L. Physicalism without supervenience. Philos Stud 178, 1529–1544 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01494-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01494-z