Review of Jaegwon Kim, Supervenience and Mind

Abstract

"Adaptation properties," as individuated according to evolutionary biology, cannot be reduced to physical properties of the token items that have the adaptation properties. This causes serious if not fatal trouble for several of Kim's crucial theses: the Causal Individuation of Kinds, Weak Supervenience, Alexander's Dictum, the synchronicity thesis (that all psychological kinds supervene on the contemporaneous physical states of the organism), the Correlation Thesis, and indeed his Restricted Correlation Thesis. All these theses are strongly individualist, in the sense of entailing that all a thing's properties are determined by its own physical properties and relations, contrary to many properties in biology and psychology.