ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the arguments for the supervenience of the mental on the physical. It examines the assumption which lies at the foundation of the entire discussion. As long as this is not the case, supervenience is a significant and reasonable thesis, and the chapter focuses on attempts to explain its source. The words in parentheses give rise to the possibility of a complete and non-deterministic theory. Papineau claims that this argument can be expanded to include the non-deterministic case. Davidson argues for a token-token identity thesis, that is, one which states that every mental event is identical to a physical one. Davidson offers a new approach to the connection between the mental and the physical. According to Davidson’s analysis, the most simple claims which attribute properties to events are existential propositions. The connection proposed by Papineau is the supervenience of mental predicates of events on the physical predicates of events.
