Physicalism, Supervenience, and Dependence: A Reply to Botterell

Andrew Botterell (this volume) has offered a fine response to my article “Supervenience and Psycho-Physical Dependence” (Campbell 2000). In my original article, I argued that Donald Davidson’s brand of supervenience should be understood as a relation between predicates rather than properties, that this formulation captures a form of psycho-physical dependence that eludes other forms of supervenience, and that, as such, it might be useful to revisit Davidsonian supervenience as a means of expressing a plausible form of physicalism. Botterell’s reply centres on offering support for the following two claims: (1) that the distinction between properties and predicates “is irrelevant to issues concerning physicalism and supervenience” (Botterell 2002, p. 155); and (2) that predicate supervenience1 is unhelpful to formulating a plausible form of physicalism. I think the first claim is false, but not for reasons that are readily apparent in the original article. My reaction to the second claim is more complicated