ABSTRACT
Accounts of supervenience almost exclusively focused on properties (that is, monadic attributes), although relations are informally mentioned sometimes in connection with supervenience. What happens if relations are explicitly taken into consideration in characterizing supervenience? The supervenience of the properties of wholes might be more appropriately explained in terms of their mereological similarity rather than their mereological indiscemibility. The supervenience relation does not seem explainable in terms of any of the candidate explanations we have just canvassed for valuational supervenience. It seems likely that mereological supervenience represents a metaphysically fundamental, sui generis form of dependence. The ethical intuitionist would take the supervenience relation as fundamental and unexplainable, something we can “intuit” through our “moral sense.” The property covariation component of supervenience does not by itself entail the dependence of the supervenient properties on the subvenient base properties, and that the dependence relation involved in supervenience may differ from case to case.
