Essay Of Supervenience

Even though the completeness of physics provides strong support for physicalism, in the case of the mind this does not necessarily mean that mental properties must be reduced to physical ones, only that the ‘mental’ must depend upon the physical base – the brain. Papineau’s claim that the “the mental is ontologically inseparable from the physical” (Papineau, 1993, p. 23) does not necessarily mean that the mental can be reduced to the physical. But if mind properties are still a particular kind of physical properties, how then are mental and physical properties related? Note that the question is in terms of relations, not in terms of realization or implementation; the later will be discussed shortly. The idea of supervenience can give us an …show more content…
Such supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respect, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respect without altering in some physical respect (Davidson, 1970/2002, p. 119)
An important remark is the fact that supervenience does not entail a reductionism as Davidson (1970/2002) suggests, “Dependence or supervenience of this kind does not entail reducibility” (Davidson, 1970/2002, p. 119). In other words, the fact that the mental properties depend upon or supervene upon physical properties does not mean that the mental properties are reducible to physical properties. For example, there are many economical transactions, in which you can pay £10 with a bank note, with other low denomination bank notes, with coins, or with debit or credit cards, or even in a more obscure and abstract ways, like barter. Likewise, a mental property cannot be reduced to a single physical property. This has been the problem of the reductive approach: in the case of the mind; for example, Identity theory (Place, 1956, Smart 1959) suggests that the mental is just a process in the brain. This