The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Science - The Department ...

Michael Silberstein
Nomological supervenience/determination
Fundamental physical laws (ontologically construed), governing the most basic level
of reality, determine or necessitate all the higher-level laws in the universe. Mereological
supervenience, on the one hand, says that the intrinsic properties of the
most basic parts determine all the properties of the whole – this is a claim about
part-whole determination (purely physical necessity). Nomological supervenience
is about nomic necessity, the most fundamental laws of physics ultimately necessitate
all the special science laws, and therefore these fundamental laws determine
everything that happens (in conjunction with initial or boundary conditions).
Thus, if two worlds are wholly alike in terms of their most fundamental laws and
in terms of initial/boundary conditions, then we should expect them to be the
same in all other respects.
In epistemological reduction one set of representational items is reduced to
another. These representational items are all human constructions and often taken
to be linguistic or linguistic surrogates, though this need not be the case. It was
noted above that reduction relations might hold among at least four different kinds
of representational items.
Concerning the epistemological links (or relations) that do the reducing, a diversity
of claims have been made. Some relations, such as derivability, make sense
as a relation between theories seen as sets of propositions but not among
models or concepts. However, certain commonalities run through the family of
epistemological-reductive relations. Most of the specific variants of epistemological
reduction fall into one of four general categories:
• Replacement
• Theoretical-derivational (logical empiricist)
• Semantic/model-theoretic/structuralist analysis
• Pragmatic
Replacement
The analogue of elimination on the epistemological side would be replacement.
Our prior ways of describing and conceptualizing the world might drop out
of use and be superseded by newer more adequate ways of representing reality.
For example, many of our folk psychological concepts might turn out not to
do a good job of characterizing the aspects of the world at which they were
directed, as happened with such concepts as demonic possession (Feyerabend,
1962).
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