ABSTRACT
The investigations of the logic of supervenience have stipulated that the supervenience base, or set of “subvening” properties, be closed under various property-forming operations. For example, Jaegwon Kim has assumed that the base is closed under Boolean operations and Bacon has assumed that the base is closed under an operation he calls “diagonalizing” or “resplicing. The chapter argues that it is generally reasonable to assume closure under disjunction and conjunction, but not always under negation or resplicing. Properties, for Bacon, are given by functions from worlds to extensions. Kim distinguishes two principal varieties of supervenience, strong and weak. The modal operators in all the definitions can be taken to express either logical (“metaphysical”) or nomological necessity as befits the supervenience thesis one has in mind.
