ABSTRACT
Supervenience has been popularized by R. M. Hare in ethics and by Donald Davidson in his treatment of the mind-body problem. In the words of Jaegwon Kim, who has led the way in clarifying it, supervenience is to be a “determinative relationship between properties without requiring correlations between them”. This chapter purposes to work out the logical relationships among several closely related variants of supervenience. In order to establish the logical relations among different concepts of supervenience, some formal tools will be handy. Supervenience in most of its guises entails necessary coextension. Leaving to methodologists of science the question of when reducibility in principle supports actual reduction, the author investigates the relation between necessary coextension and reducibility in principle. The chapter considers that many supervenience enthusiasts would cool at necessary coextension: they didn’t mean to be saying anything quite so strong.
