A counterexample to strong individual supervenience involving individuals with contested cross-world identity cannot be straightforwardly re-described as a failure of global supervenience without begging the question against Haecceitist ontologies.

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1 reason against

Reasons For

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Reason for

1.Haecceitist theories posit that individuals have essential properties independent of intrinsic qualities, making cross-world identity determinate even when qualitative profiles match.
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2.Global supervenience requires all possible worlds differing in some fact to differ in base properties; it cannot accommodate haecceitist differences without begging the question.
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3.Reanalyzing counterexamples to strong individual supervenience as global supervenience failures presupposes non-haecceitist modal semantics, which the haecceitist rightfully rejects.
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Reasons Against

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Reason against

1.If haecceitist identity conditions are coherent, they should be expressible within the base properties that ground global supervenience, making the distinction merely notational.
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2.The claim conflates metaphysical questions about identity with epistemological questions about how to describe counterexamples; these require separate treatment.
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3.Strong individual supervenience's failure can be diagnosed without invoking cross-world identity disputes—appeal to bare identity is already metaphysically suspect.
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Key Terms

Haecceitist ontologies(metaphysics): Philosophical views that say individual things have a special 'thisness' or 'whatness' that makes them uniquely themselves—not just based on their properties, but something deeper. Haecceitists believe two things could be completely identical in every property yet still be different things.
Ontology(Carnap argues this enterprise is based on a mistake): The philosophical discipline that tries to answer hard questions about what there really is.
begging the question(Listed alongside equivocation as an example of a fallacy that highlights important issues in real-life arguing): A fallacy also known as circular reasoning
counterexample([IHT] arg. 2): A possible obligational situation (casus possibilis positus) that verifies the antecedent and falsifies the consequent of an inference
cross-world identity(as used in metaphysics and modal logic): The idea that the same object or person can exist in different possible scenarios or alternate realities. For example, you in this world and you in an alternate world where you became a doctor instead of a teacher.
global supervenience(Modal supervenience relations in philosophy of mind and metaphysics): A globally supervenes on B if and only if no two possible worlds share the same global pattern of distribution of B-properties while differing in their global pattern of distribution of A-properties.
strong individual supervenience(Metaphysics of supervenience; contrasted with global supervenience): A supervenience relation holding at the level of individual entities, such that any two individuals alike in subvening properties are alike in supervening properties
supervenience(Philosophy of mind and reduction; contrasted with full reduction): A relation in which mental (or higher-level) states are dependent on physiological (or lower-level) states such that any two cases with identical lower-level bases are identical in their higher-level states; a necessary but not sufficient condition for reduction.

Connections

2 topics

Consciousness & Mind1 linked Modality & Possibility1 linked

Any counterexample to strong individual supervenience can be isolated to generat...Global supervenience requires all possible worlds differing in some fact to diff...

Details

Type: claim
Perspectives: 2 (1 for, 1 against)
Edits: 1 edit