segunda-feira, 21 de fevereiro de 2011

Fundamentality: Structures, powers, and a supervenience dualism

If we want to say what “fundamentality” means, we have to start by approaching what we generally find at the empty place of the predicate “____ is fundamental”: entities and theories. At this article, I tried to make a metaphysical approach of what is for some entity to be fundamental, and to talk about fundamental incomplete and complete theories. To do that, I start stating a notion of “entity” and looking at the difference at perceived entities. That difference lead us to talk about the entities’ structures and powers, and about the supervenience between these last two. The supervenience talk make us to see the divergence between emergentism and reductionism as the difference between the irreducibility of laws and the reducibility of powers and structures to lower-order domains. Then, we conclude that “fundamentality” is a mereological relation – a relation that a whole structure has to a certain combination of its structural parts or that a power has to a certain combination of its constituent powers – of to be identical and to exist in virtue of them.

Key-Words: Mereology. Fundamentality. Reduction. Emergence. Supervenience.


Citação: Cid, Rodrigo (2011). "Fundamentality: Structures, powers, and a supervenience dualism". Philpapers. Acessado em  /  /  , e encontrado em http://philpapers.org/archive/CIDFSP.1.pdf