Supervenience. An Outline of the Concept

Abstract

„Supervenience” is now a part of the philosophical vocabulary of the analytical tradition. The basic ontological idea of supervenience is an attempt to characterize the relationship between families of properties, such as moral and natural properties, mental and physical properties, or macro-properties and micro-properties. The aim of the paper is to discuss recent variants of supervenience relation (microphysical supervenience, global and local supervenience, weak and strong supervenience, natural and logical supervenience). Supervenience relations are almost always unexplanatory, that is, supervenience itself merely picks out a certain kind of covariation or corelation - it does not explain why that covariation holds.