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Supervenience, Reduction, and Translation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Neil Dewar
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Abstract

This article considers the following question: What is the relationship between supervenience and reduction? I investigate this formally: first, by introducing a recent argument by Christian List to the effect that one can have supervenience without reduction; then, by considering how the notion of Nagelian reduction can be related to the formal apparatus of definability and translation theory; then, by showing how, in the context of propositional theories, topological constraints on supervenience serve to enforce reducibility; and, finally, by showing how constraints derived from the theory of ultraproducts can enforce reducibility in the context of first-order theories.

Type
Logic, Formal Epistemology, and Decision Theory
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 86 , Issue 5 , December 2019 , pp. 942 - 954
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Versions of this article were presented at the New Perspectives on Inter-theory Reduction Workshop (held at the University of Salzburg), the Second Annual Bristol-MCMP Workshop on Foundations of Physics (at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy), and the PSA. I am grateful to the audiences at those events for helpful questions and commentary and to Laurenz Hudetz and Katie Robertson for many discussions of these and related ideas.

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