Andrew Bailey

Supervenience and Physicalism

Discussion of the supervenience relation in the philosophical literature of recent years has become Byzantine in its intricacy and diversity. Subtle modulations of the basic concept have been tooled and retooled with increasing frequency, until supervenience has lost nearly all its original lustre as a simple and powerful tool for cracking open refractory philosophical problems. I present a conceptual model of the supervenience relation that captures all the important extant concepts (and suggests a few new ones) without ignoring the complexities uncovered during work over the past two decades. I test my analysis by applying it to the problem of defining physicalism, concluding that the thesis of physicalism is best captured by the conjunction of two supervenience relations.

Spatial Perception, Embodiment, and Scientific Realism

David Morris’s The Sense of Space is a subtle, careful, and ambitious examination of spatial experience: that is, of how we perceive the spatial environment around us—its various depths, our orientation within it, the voluminousness of the objects that fill it, and so on. The argument of the book has several strands, but its key thesis is as follows. “The tradition” has it, in one way or another, that our experience of space is generated by using sensory information to construct and constantly update an inner mental model of our environment and our body’s position within it. By contrast, Morris argues that we perceive space by moving our bodies in the world, and that the content of spatial perception consists in the constraints and limits on movement imposed jointly by our bodies and the environment in which they are located. For example, our experience of the spatial properties of a tennis racquet does not inhere in some inner mental geometrical model of the racquet,