Supervenience, Composition, and Physicalism

Abstract Physical reality is fundamental and all genuine mental states and properties are grounded in physical states and properties. The mental is dependent on the physical, but the physical is not dependent on the mental. In this way, the physical determines the mental. These ideas are a commonplace in a central contemporary tradition in the philosophy of mind. They express (at least part of) the ‘physicalist’ preference for the physical as (in some sense) more basic than the mental. For physicalists, the major difficulty has been to make this set of ideas precise without undermining their initial plausibility. In the recent past, philosophers beginning from this starting-point have been led to propose accounts of mental phenomena which have proved difficult to defend in detail. One such account is the type identity thesis of the mental and the physical; another is analytical functionalism.