Dennett’s Account of Mind versus Kim’s Supervenience Argument

Supervenience & Emergentism: A Critical Study in Philosophy of Mind

The paper intends to clarify whether the supervenience theory of mind, with special reference to Kim, can be identified with the emergence theory of mind. Kim’s thesis admits that the mental properties are in some sense dependent on the physical properties. Such supervenience might be understood to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects, i.e. an object cannot alter ...

A Discourse Account of Argument Containment Eeects

Varieties of Supervenience

Supervenience is a concept borrowed from moral philosophy by philosophy of mind to solve the mind-body problem. The mind-body problem is actually a set of problems, among which the major ones are the Consciousness problem (Illustrative instance: how can physical states have felt qualities?) and the Intentionality Problem (Illustrative instance: How can physical states be about something, or be ...

An Argument Against the Unification Account of Explanation

This paper argues that an increase in the known unifying power of a theory is often not accompanied in an increase the perceived quality of its explanations. The theory may explain many new things, but it does not explain the old things any better just because it now explains the new things. This strongly suggests that unification accounts of explanation are mistaken. I conclude with a discussi...

The Ten Thousand Kims

In Korean culture, the names of family members are recorded in special family books. This makes it possible to follow the distribution of Korean family names far back in history. It is shown here that these name distributions are well described by a simple null model, the random group formation (RGF) model. This model makes it possible to predict how the name distributions change and these pred...