ABSTRACT
“Supervenience” has been defined in a variety of ways, and different and conflicting things have been said about the relations between different supervenience concepts. The concepts have been deployed in the discussion of a range of different philosophical problems, sometimes to formulate a thesis to be defended sometimes to clarify or sharpen a problem by spelling out the common ground between conflicting theses. The separation of metaphysics from semantics is not easy to accomplish, and some of the tensions and obscurities in the concept of supervenience may derive from the failure to have achieved a clean separation. Jaegwon Kim has a different kind of reason for thinking that the global supervenience of the mental on the physical may not be sufficiently strong for materialism. The problem is that global supervenience of the mental on the physical is compatible with large and important mental differences being dependent on trivial and seemingly irrelevant physical differences.
