ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide the possibility of deducing anti-realism from supervenience, using an inference to the best explanation. It investigates in what way, if at all, the realist can explain supervenience. The chapter discusses S. Blackburn’s argument that the phenomenon of supervenience, is for the realist, an unsolvable mystery. It investigates the extent to which these schemes correspond to the two domains discussed in the present work. In a critique of Blackburn’s position, H. Noonan claims that there is an additional way to explain this “mystery”, without recourse to any anti-realist assumption with respect to the supervening domain. According to Noonan’s model, ethical predicates express concepts with a structure which R. Nozick has called “best instantiated realization”. According to Nozick, the concept of solidity, for example, has the following structure: the conditions in the series describe the density of the object’s matter.
