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(1993) Synthese 95 (2).

Psychophysical supervenience and nonreductive materialism

Ausonio Marras

pp. 275-304

Jaegwon Kim and others have claimed that (strong) psychophysical supervenience entails the reducibility of mental properties to physical properties. I argue that this claim is unwarranted with respect to epistemic (explanatory) reducibility (either of a ‘global’ or of a ‘local’ sort), as well as with respect to ontological reducibility. I then attempt to show that a robust version of nonreductive materialism (which I call ‘supervenient token-physicalism’) can be defended against the charge that nonreductive materialism leads to epiphenomenalism in failing to account for the causal or explanatory relevance of mental properties.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1007/BF01064591

Full citation:

Marras, A. (1993). Psychophysical supervenience and nonreductive materialism. Synthese 95 (2), pp. 275-304.

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