Wondering (as a part of my inquiry into the “epiphenomon” relation) if any of you are familiar with the “supervenience” relation. They seem to be some sort of opposite to one another. Both involve many-to-one relations, but in the “epiphenomenon” relation, one effect is picked out from among many effects of a cause, whereas in the supervenience relation, one cause is picked out from many causes of an event. Anyway, here is a description of supervenience in a biological context.
. “…A given level of fitness or adaptedness can be attained by a very wide, and usually unknown, variety of underlying physical substrates. Philosophers call such a relation supervenience (Kim 1978). A property is supervenient when a given underlying physical condition is sufficient to produce it, but when at the same time many other conditions could produce it as well. Supervenient properties are not reducible to a particular underling configurationl However, they are ont one white less materially grounded than reductionists have always claimed. We may conclude, then, that expected fitness is not only a probabilistic disposition but a supervenient proptery of organisms (Sober, 1984 a) Readers of this book will recognize that the notion of supervenience is the philosophical or conceptual correlate of the microstate-macrostate distinction first introduced into statistical mechanics and thermodynamics by Maxwell and Bolzmann, and so is another product of the probability revolution. The beauty of this analysis is that in making fitness or relative adaptedness explanatory terms, philosophers are relying on and pointing to the probabilistic nature of modern Darwinism itself to solve a problem about its conceptual structure. [fn 13, pp 518-9, in Depew, D.J. and Weber, Bruce H. Darwinism evolving. Cambridge, MA 1997. MIT Press.
Nick Thompson
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
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