[FRIAM] Supervenience

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Wondering (as a part of my inquiry into the "epiphenomon" relation) if any
of you are familiar with the "supervenience" relation.  They seem to be some
sort of opposite to one another.  Both involve many-to-one relations, but in
the "epiphenomenon" relation, one effect is picked out from among many
effects of a cause, whereas in the supervenience relation, one cause is
picked out from many causes of an event.   Anyway, here is a description of
supervenience in a biological context. 

 

.   ".A given level of fitness or adaptedness can be attained by a very
wide, and usually unknown, variety of underlying physical substrates.
Philosophers call such a relation supervenience (Kim 1978).  A property is
supervenient when a given underlying physical condition is sufficient to
produce it, but when at the same time many other conditions could produce it
as well.  Supervenient properties are not reducible to a particular
underling configurationl  However, they  are ont one white less materially
grounded than reductionists have always claimed.  We may conclude, then,
that expected fitness is not only a probabilistic disposition  but a
supervenient proptery of organisms (Sober, 1984 a) Readers of this book will
recognize that the notion of supervenience is the philosophical or
conceptual correlate of the microstate-macrostate distinction first
introduced  into statistical mechanics and thermodynamics by Maxwell and
Bolzmann, and so is another product of the probability revolution.  The
beauty of this analysis is that in making fitness or relative adaptedness
explanatory terms, philosophers are relying on and pointing to the
probabilistic nature of modern Darwinism itself to solve a problem about its
conceptual structure.  [fn 13, pp 518-9, in Depew, D.J. and Weber, Bruce H.
Darwinism evolving. Cambridge, MA 1997.  MIT Press.  

 

 

 

Nick Thompson

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> 

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

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