Talk:Supervenience

message: I rewrote the intro since, though it was good, it did not seem to capture the core ideas in the supervenience literature, which I have been wading through for some time now.   Also, I removed the chart, for reasons similar to those cited below.  In fact, realization itself has developed into something of a literature, and its relation to supervenience is hotly debated.    However, I do like the chart and think it should be re-introduced in a subsection, perhaps on mental causation.  At any rate, I hope my changes will be improved upon, and apologize for any mistakes or abuses of wiki convention (I still consider myself a wiki neophyte).   Jyoshimi 05:12, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Intro rewrite and (temporary?) chart removal 

message: That chart doesn't show supervenience, it shows one physical property that realizes a mental property causing another physical property that realizes a mental property. Sure, realization is one way of getting supervenience, but it's certainly not the only way. And there's nothing in supervenience that has low-level properties causing each other. Just think of supervenience in meta-ethics. --GodRousingDogPipes 06:46, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chart 

message: I don't understand what is meant by organism in the sentence:
"The value of a physical object to an organism is sometimes held to be supervenient upon the physical properties of the object."
Should it be replaced by agent? Is that any better?
:That's sounds like better wording to me. I've changed it. — Trilobite (Talk) 22:38, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  About value 

message: Some time ago a group of editors set up a "work in progress" page (at Talk:Physics/wip) to hammer out a consensus for the Physics article, which for too long had been in an unstable state. Discussion of the lead for the article has taken a great deal of time and thousands of words. The definitional and philosophical foundations seem to cause most headaches, along with the status of the special sciences and their supervenience on physics, or their reduction to physics. Progress has been made. Why not review some of the proposals for the lead material that people are putting forward, or put forward your own, or simply join the discussion? The more contributors the better, for a consensus. – Noetica 02:07, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  The review of [[Physics]] continues at [[Talk:Physics/wip]]

message: Under "Definitions", the second formal FOL statement has three opening parentheses, and only two closing ones.  Is this is a mistake?  Jameshfisher 22:48, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes.  Fixed it.  Thanks.  Jyoshimi (talk) 07:12, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Missing bracket in FOL statement 

message: In the first formal definition the first two universal quantifiers are limited in scope to the antecedent only, while the variables that are bound to them appear in the consequent. This doesn't seem to me to be well-formed.
There should only be one parenthesis after the iff in the antecedent and there should be no parenthesis that start off the consequent.
are my assessments accurate? 
I went ahead and made the modification.
Kmddmk (talk) 23:55, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  FOL definition not well-formed 

message: I was going to test the waters if people thought a part in the article on arguments about Supervenience and implications for reductive accounts of physical world with specific examples of quantum theory was a good idea. I am new to wikipedia but feel this is an important part of understanding how supervenience is important beyond simple considerations in the philosophy of mind. 
Leave me a comment if you think it will be a good idea.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Daniel jones (talk • contribs) 08:19, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree it's a good idea; supervenience is used in many areas of philosophy.  If it's done I think it should make reference to some existing source or discussion.  A quick google turned this up, for example: http://iopscience.iop.org/1751-8121/40/12/S16  Jyoshimi (talk) 19:09, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Suggestion for section on Supervenience in Philosophy of Physics. 

message: I'm not dumb by any means, but your use of language is so specialized, I have no idea what this means. You might as well be writing in Russian. I just wanted to get a sense of the word before going back to reading something else that used the word. This is a general encyclopedia.
I agree. The writing throughout is horrid.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.161.215.30 (talk) 18:39, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I am partly to blame for the intro paragraph.    Previously the entry was inaccurate in some ways, so I tried to fix the problems.  However I myself am steeped in the literature, so ended up writing something too technical perhaps, though others helped make it better.  Anyway I agree it should begin with something more accessible.   Perhaps something like "Supervenience is a technical concept that philosophers use to describe dependencies between various kinds of thing.  For example, the properties of the mind are widely thought to depend on the properties of the brain.   So we have a supervenience relation. "  Or something, maybe making reference to that diagram with the hierarchy from social levels down to elementary particles.   Then the next paragraph could read "Supervenience is a complex topic, and is described using a whole constellation of philosophical concepts..."  Or something like that.   I'm not sure.   I won't have time to make the changes but certainly hope someone tries to do so.    Similarly for the rest of the article.  Jyoshimi (talk) 19:07, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: It seems a bad idea to put an example into the first paragraph of the lede, the language needs to be simplified instead for that. If there is a referenced example it can go the lede as a separate second/third paragraph. This would make it far more readable. It is preferably to have a referenced example rather than WP:OR. Cheers. IRWolfie- (talk) 16:55, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

text: Jyoshimi, I agree you've captured the literary style well :) That's not really a bad thing if it's further along in the article, where I doubt it could be avoided. The topic does get complicated quickly and those subtle details are considered important, if not light reading. The approach you suggest sounds like the way to go… a lede introducing the topic and touching lightly on what's covered in the rest of article. The reader can click the links (e.g., multiple realizability) or skip ahead. An adequate stand-alone summary that's nonetheless accessible, is probably too much to hope for. Wrong way around or no, I'm not quite sure if 24's example captures how the notion is applied, though people do bark from time to time. Believe it or not, “C-fibers” are actually a very common example.—Machine Elf 1735 17:50, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

text: Actually, don't move it to the top. New messages always appear at the bottom of WP talk pages.—Machine Elf 1735 23:40, 14 May 2012 (UTC)
replies: text:  Got it, thanks.  Jyoshimi (talk) 00:06, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

text: I agree, and my background is self-taught engineering. I Am going to go ahead and delete the tag at the top of the article. --Guy Macon (talk) 03:48, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Sheesh. How about rewriting the intro at least in language that is accessible to a lay reader?

message: we definetly need sources for the two definitions. the stanford encyclopedia article seems to rely solely on the indiscernible-definition. plus i have to admit that i do not quite get the other definition (which should be horrible with respect to the lay reader, i do have a B.A. in philosophy)--178.5.77.243 (talk) 17:23, 3 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  Here are some references.   Probably closest is my own paper, not surprisingly, but I'm not sure about citing myself here .   Horgan uses the definition you didn't like (and I agree it's hard to follow) .  Kim focuses more on the first indiscernibility def.  Also he's kind of canonical    It's hard to find a direct reference to the definitions given here.  The literature mostly focuses on the stuff discussed in the varieties section.  There aren't many efforts to pull out the generic  definitions, that abstract away from all the details of strong vs. weak, local vs. global.  Also I made the indiscernibility relation explicit with higher order quantifiers.  So I don't think this formulation exists anywhere exactly as stated.   At any rate, suggestions on how to fold this in welcome.   Jyoshimi (talk) 23:19, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definitions 

message: This diagram as displayed was more of an obstacle to understanding for me than an aide, even though I had already read some of the main literature on this subject. Probably the issue is that the arrow’s ‘prior’ meaning to me is something like “determines” or “causes”, which would be upward pointing. So to properly interpret this diagram, I had to contextually redefine the arrow, but within an unclear context due to not already understanding “supervenience’. Assuming my reaction is not idiosyncratic and a change in the diagram is needed, it is not clear to me what the improvements would be. One possibility: (1) slightly enlarge the distances between the boxes in order to enlarge the arrow images; (2) use two arrows pointing in opposite directions, perhaps one solid and one white with black outline, perhaps with them at the 1/3 and 2/3 distance points across the grayed boxes; and (3) instead of the present language at the bottom of the diagram, create a key with the downward arrow symbol explained as “supervenes on”, and the upward arrow symbol being explained as “determines”, although “disputed” or some other term may be better here, not sure. Since the topic of the article is "supervenience", that downward arrow probably should be solid and first in the sense of being on the left side.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Phillup23 (talk • contribs) 14:14, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  “Levels of existence” diagram on first page 

message: The example, "Properties of individual molecules supervene on the properties of individual atoms," seems either wrong or misleading. Compare it to the other example, "Whether there is a table in the living room supervenes on the positions of molecules in the living room." (emphasis added) Certainly there are many molecules whose properties completely change with only a change in the position of its constituent atoms. Proteins are a paradigmatic example of this. A protein in a denatured configuration has all the same amino acids as it had in its native state, but the protein's properties are completely different. So the example is not true of proteins: "Properties of individual [protein] molecules supervene on the properties of individual atoms," is not true since it is not the case that "some difference in Y ['the properties of individual atoms'] is necessary for any difference in X [the properties of the protein] to be possible." I think much of the misplaced reductionism associated with the concept of supervenience is due to this confusion between supervenience on patterns or structure versus supervenience on the constituents of the pattern. Nick (talk) 14:17, 2 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Molecule example is wrong or misleading