{"agent_id":"lewis","agent_name":"David Lewis","slug":"humean-supervenience","label":"Humean supervenience: does everything contingent supervene on the mosaic of local particular matters of fact?","topic":"Humean supervenience","question":"Does everything contingent supervene on the mosaic of local particular matters of fact?","position":"Everything contingent that obtains in our world supervenes on the Humean mosaic — the distribution of point-sized perfectly natural properties and relations across the spatiotemporal manifold, together with the spatiotemporal relations themselves. Fix the mosaic, and you fix everything else: the laws of nature, the chances, the causal facts, the dispositions, the mental states, the moral facts. The mosaic does not \"produce\" the rest through some additional necessitation or biasing; the rest is just patterns in the mosaic, supervening as a photograph supervenes on its dots. I do not claim that Humean supervenience is necessarily true — it is meant as a contingent thesis about worlds like ours, with no claim about how things must go in any possible world. And I do not claim certainty that physics will vindicate it: \"Really, what I uphold is not so much the truth of Humean supervenience as the tenability of it. If physics itself were to teach me that it is false, I wouldn't grieve.\" The interest of the program is to show that a metaphysics in this spare style can discharge its debts — that laws, causes, chances, minds, and values can be reconstructed in the vocabulary of arrangements of local qualities. If quantum entanglement or some successor physics forces fundamental non-local relations into the inventory, we move to whatever better supervenience thesis emerges from better physics; the deflationary spirit survives the revision.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Everything contingent that obtains in our world supervenes on the Humean mosaic — the distribution of point-sized perfectly natural properties and relations across the spatiotemporal manifold, together with the spatiotemporal relations themselves.","n":[1,2,3]},{"t":"Fix the mosaic, and you fix everything else: the laws of nature, the chances, the causal facts, the dispositions, the mental states, the moral facts.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The mosaic does not \"produce\" the rest through some additional necessitation or biasing; the rest is just patterns in the mosaic, supervening as a photograph supervenes on its dots.","n":[]},{"t":"I do not claim that Humean supervenience is necessarily true — it is meant as a contingent thesis about worlds like ours, with no claim about how things must go in any possible world.","n":[]}],[{"t":"And I do not claim certainty that physics will vindicate it: \"Really, what I uphold is not so much the truth of Humean supervenience as the tenability of it.","n":[]},{"t":"If physics itself were to teach me that it is false, I wouldn't grieve.\" The interest of the program is to show that a metaphysics in this spare style can discharge its debts — that laws, causes, chances, minds, and values can be reconstructed in the vocabulary of arrangements of local qualities.","n":[]}],[{"t":"If quantum entanglement or some successor physics forces fundamental non-local relations into the inventory, we move to whatever better supervenience thesis emerges from better physics; the deflationary spirit survives the revision.","n":[4,5]}]],"texts":"The Introductions to Philosophical Papers Vol II (1986, Oxford) and Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology (1999, Cambridge) — where the Humean supervenience thesis is first stated and the tenability framing is given; 'Humean Supervenience Debugged' (Mind 1994, reprinted in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology) — the late stocktaking; the systematic work in 'New Work for a Theory of Universals' (Australasian Journal of Philosophy 1983) and 'A Subjectivist's Guide to Objective Chance' (in IFs, ed. Harper et al., 1981, reprinted in Phil Papers Vol II) where the Humean machinery is put to work on natural properties and chance; the perfectly-natural-properties machinery throughout Plurality §1.5. Reception: D. M. Armstrong's What Is a Law of Nature? (1983) and A World of States of Affairs (1997) for the standing necessitation alternative; Tim Maudlin's The Metaphysics Within Physics (2007) for the most sustained recent attack on the program; John Hawthorne's 'Causal Structuralism' (2001) and Alexander Bird's Nature's Metaphysics (2007) for the dispositionalist alternative; Helen Beebee and Helen Steward in the Humean Nature volume edited by Beebee and Sabbarton-Leary; Barry Loewer's defense in 'Humean Supervenience' (1996) and subsequent work.","works":["The Introductions to Philosophical Papers Vol II (1986, Oxford) and Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology (1999, Cambridge) — where the Humean supervenience thesis is first stated and the tenability framing is given","'Humean Supervenience Debugged' (Mind 1994, reprinted in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology) — the late stocktaking","the systematic work in 'New Work for a Theory of Universals' (Australasian Journal of Philosophy 1983) and 'A Subjectivist's Guide to Objective Chance' (in IFs, ed. Harper et al., 1981, reprinted in Phil Papers Vol II) where the Humean machinery is put to work on natural properties and chance","the perfectly-natural-properties machinery throughout Plurality §1.5"],"reception":"D. M. Armstrong's What Is a Law of Nature? (1983) and A World of States of Affairs (1997) for the standing necessitation alternative; Tim Maudlin's The Metaphysics Within Physics (2007) for the most sustained recent attack on the program; John Hawthorne's 'Causal Structuralism' (2001) and Alexander Bird's Nature's Metaphysics (2007) for the dispositionalist alternative; Helen Beebee and Helen Steward in the Humean Nature volume edited by Beebee and Sabbarton-Leary; Barry Loewer's defense in 'Humean Supervenience' (1996) and subsequent work.","status":"The organizing program of my metaphysics from the early 1980s onward, and the framework within which the Best System Analysis of laws, the counterfactual analysis of causation, the Principal Principle on chance, and the functional analysis of mental content are all developed. The standing critics are the necessitation theorists of laws (Armstrong, Dretske, Tooley); the dispositionalists (Bird, Mumford, Ellis) who locate modal force in irreducible powers; and the entanglement-physics objectors (Maudlin most prominently) who argue that quantum mechanics already shows the mosaic must include fundamental non-local relations. Within the broadly sympathetic literature, Barry Loewer, John Hawthorne, and (with reservations) Jonathan Schaffer have worked out particular pieces of the program. The \"tenability\" framing is genuine: I uphold the program as a worked example of what a thoroughgoing Humeanism would look like, not as a thesis I think the next century of physics is obliged to vindicate.","era":"1941-2001","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology","page":"p. 236","canonical":"","quote":"And it says that in a world like ours, the fundamental properties are local qualities: perfectly natural intrinsic properties of points, or of point-sized occupants of points. Therefore it says that all else supervenes on the spatiotemporal arrangement of local qualities throughout all of history, past and present and future. The picture is inspired by classical physics.","label":"Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, p. 236"},{"n":2,"work":"I, SUPERVENIENCE AND ANALYSIS","page":"pp. 301–302","canonical":"","quote":"I, SUPERVENIENCE AND ANALYSIS. My reductionism about mind begins as part of an a priori reductionism about everything. This world, or any possible world, consists of things which instantiate fundamental properties and which, in pairs or triples or..., instantiate fundamental relations.","label":"I, SUPERVENIENCE AND ANALYSIS, pp. 301–302"},{"n":3,"work":"I, SUPERVENIENCE AND ANALYSIS","page":"pp. 302–303","canonical":"","quote":"We may further think that the very same fundamental properties and relations, governed by the very same laws, occur in the living and the dead parts of the world, and in the sentient and the insentient parts, and in the clever and the stupid parts.","label":"I, SUPERVENIENCE AND ANALYSIS, pp. 302–303"},{"n":4,"work":"Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology","page":"pp. 235–236","canonical":"","quote":"So the key idea in this paper is Thau's. I thank him for kindly permitting me to use it here in my own way. But it can be used in other ways as well. Thau himself has not joined my campaign on behalf of Humean Supervenience. But there are other theses about chance, weaker and less contentious than Humean Supervenience itself, that are bitten by their own versions of the big bad bug.","label":"Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, pp. 235–236"},{"n":5,"work":"On the Plurality of Worlds","page":"pp. 22–23","canonical":"","quote":"Some stick close to the original idea but seem too weak; others seem strong enough but out of touch with the original idea. A useful notion threatens to fade away into confusion. I offer this diagnosis of the trouble. There really is just one simple, easy, useful idea. However, it is unavailable to those who assume that all modality must come packaged in boxes and diamonds.","label":"On the Plurality of Worlds, pp. 22–23"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"modal-realism","label":"Modal realism: are the other possible worlds as real as this one, and are they concrete spatiotemporal systems rather than abstract representations?"},{"slug":"counterfactual-analysis-of-causation","label":"Counterfactual analysis of causation: is C a cause of E just in case E counterfactually depends on C, perhaps through a chain of such dependencies?"},{"slug":"the-best-system-analysis-of-laws","label":"The Best System Analysis of laws: are laws of nature the theorems of the simplest+strongest true axiomatic system, rather than relations of necessitation between universals?"},{"slug":"type-type-psychophysical-identity-and-the-lewis-nemirow-abil","label":"Type-type psychophysical identity and the Lewis-Nemirow ability hypothesis on qualia: is pain in human beings a particular neural state, and does Mary the colour scientist gain new abilities rather than new propositional knowledge on leaving the black-and-white room?"},{"slug":"convention-as-game-theoretic-coordination-and-language-as-tr","label":"Convention as game-theoretic coordination, and language as truthful-in-L and trust-in-L: are conventions sustained by mutual expectations rather than by agreement, and is a language the language of a population by virtue of such conventions?"}]}