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Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'The Rediscovery of the Mind' and 'Postscripts on supervenience'

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5 ideas

7. Existence / C. Structure of Existence / 2. Reduction

3473	Reduction can be of things, properties, ideas or causes [Searle]
	Full Idea: I find at least five different senses of "reduction" in the literature - ontological (genes/DNA), property ontological (heat/mean molecular energy), theoretical (gas laws/statistics), logical/definitional (average plumber), and causal (solids/molecules).
	From: John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.II)
	A reaction: A useful pointer towards some much needed clearer thought about reduction. It is necessary to cross reference this list against reductions which are either ontological or epistemological or linguistic.

7. Existence / C. Structure of Existence / 5. Supervenience / c. Significance of supervenience

3532	Solidity in a piston is integral to its structure, not supervenient [Maslin on Searle]
	Full Idea: Searle's defence of causally efficacious supervenient mind won't work, because, unlike the mind, the solidity of a piston is not a distinct and separate phenomenon from its microstructure.
	From: comment on John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.V) by Keith T. Maslin - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind 7.6
	A reaction: Searle struggles to find analogies for his position - and that, in my view, is highly significant in the philosophy of mind. If there is nothing else like your proposed theory, it is probably just human vainglory.

3533	Is supervenience just causality? [Searle, by Maslin]
	Full Idea: For Searle the supervenience relation is just causality.
	From: report of John Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind [1992], Ch. 5.V) by Keith T. Maslin - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind 7.6
	A reaction: 'Supervenience' seems, in that case, to be an irrelevant word, which was only used when the mind-body connection was a bit loose and mysterious. Mind is identical to brain, or a property of the brain. I like 'process of the brain'.

13746	Supervenience is just a 'surface' relation of pattern covariation, which still needs deeper explanation [Kim]
	Full Idea: Supervenience itself is not an explanatory relation, not a 'deep' metaphysical relation; rather it is a 'surface' relation that reports a pattern of property covariation, suggesting the presence of an interesting dependency relation that might explain it.
	From: Jaegwon Kim (Postscripts on supervenience [1993], 2)
	A reaction: I think the underlying idea here is that supervenience appeals to the Humean view of physical laws as mere regularities, but it is no good for those who seek underlying mechanisms to explain the patterns and regularities. Humeans are wrong.

13745	Supervenience is not a dependence relation, on the lines of causal, mereological or semantic dependence [Kim]
	Full Idea: It is a mistake, or at least misleading, to think of supervenience itself as a special and distinctive type of dependence relation, alongside causal dependence, mereological dependence, semantic dependence, and others.
	From: Jaegwon Kim (Postscripts on supervenience [1993], 2)
	A reaction: The point, I take it, is that supervenience is something which requires explanation, rather than being a conclusion to the debate. Why are statues beautiful? Why do brains generate minds?