Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-k8lnt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-31T23:50:43.144Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Undermining Undermined: Why Humean Supervenience Never Needed to Be Debugged (Even If It's a Necessary Truth)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

John T. Roberts
John T. Roberts*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
*
†Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, C.B. #3125, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599; email: jtrosap@email.unc.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The existence of “undermining futures” appears to show that a contradiction can be deduced from the conjunction of Humean supervenience (HS) about chance and the Principal Principle. A number of strategies for rescuing HS from this problem have been proposed recently. In this paper, a novel way of defending HS from the threat is presented, and it is argued that this defense has advantages not shared by others. In particular, it requires no revisionism about chance, and it is equally available to defenders of HS who hold HS to be necessary and those who hold it to be contingent.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

‡

I would like to thank Joe Camp, John Earman, and Brie Gertler for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

References

Carroll, John (1994), Laws of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511619908CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, Ned (1994), “Correcting the Guide to Objective Chance”, Mind 103:505–517.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halpin, John (1994), “Legitimizing Chance: The Best-System Approach to Probabilistic Laws in Physical Theory”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 72:317–338.10.1080/00048409412346131CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, David (1986a), “Introduction”, in Lewis, David, Philosophical Papers. Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, ix–xvii.Google Scholar
Lewis, David (1986b), “A Subjectivist's Guide to Objective Chance”, in Lewis, David, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 83–132.Google Scholar
Lewis, David (1994), “Humean Supervenience Debugged”, Mind 103:473–490.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thau, Michael (1994), “Undermining and Admissibility”, Mind 103:491–503.10.1093/mind/103.412.491CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vranas, Peter (1998), “Who's Afraid of Undermining?”. Paper read at the 1998 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association.Google Scholar