Supervenience among classes of relations

Leuenberger, S. (2013) Supervenience among classes of relations. In: Holtje, M., Schnieder, B. and Steinberg, A. (eds.) Varieties of Dependence: Ontological Dependence, Grounding, Supervenience, Response-Dependence. Philosophia: Munich, Germany, pp. 325-346. ISBN 9783884051054

Abstract

This paper extends the definition of strong supervenience to cover classes of relations of any adicity, including transworld relations. It motivates that project by showing that not all interesting supervenience claims involving relations are global supervenience claims. The proposed definition has five welcome features: it reduces to the familiar definition in the special case where the classes contain only monadic properties; it equips supervenience with the expected formal properties, such as transitivity and monotonicity; it entails that a relation supervenes on its converse; it classifies certain paradigms correctly; it makes distinctions even in the realm of the non-contingent, as witnessed by the fact that identity does not supervene on any class of relations. Finally, the paper applies the defined concept, and the related concept of orthogonality, to the study of internal and external relations.

• Item Type: Book Sections
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Leuenberger, Professor Stephan
• Authors: Leuenberger, S.
• Subjects: B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > B Philosophy (General)
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities > Philosophy
• Publisher: Philosophia
• ISBN: 9783884051054
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2013 Philosophia
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced with the permission of the publisher

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