I don't think we need any special formal language to discover that a neural event cannot be considered to be true or false, valid or invalid, in any way analogous to how inferences can be. I don't see how this fact could even be arguable, whatever we might think the implications of it are.

I don't see how this fact could even be arguable, whatever we might think the implications of it are. — Janus

You underestimate the power of the Dark Si... erm, of Materialism. :naughty:

Can you give an example of such an inference which is not merely a matter of definition? — Janus

Isn’t much of scientific exploration built around reasoned conjecture of that kind? Using a discovery made about some subject to infer that, if we do this, or observe that, then this will happen, or we will observe that. Also recall that in the progress of mathematical physics the last hundred years, many discoveries were made which required the development of a new conceptual language and novel terminology, which was then extended by the processes of inference. A stellar example would be Einstein’s prediction of the curvature of light by the mass of stars, confirmation of which made Arthur Eddington famous.

I don't think we need any special formal language to discover that a neural event cannot be considered to be true or false, valid or invalid, in any way analogous to how inferences can be. I don't see how this fact could even be arguable, whatever we might think the implications of it are. — Janus

But notice, that is an argument I’ve put forward - there’s nothing directly corresponding to such a conjecture in Davidson’s paper or the articles on supervenience that we’ve been referencing. It may be completely off target for some reason that I haven’t understood yet. I have to allow that possibility.

I see such strictly non-deductive inferences as being abductive as consisting in imagining, based on past experience what would be thought to be the likely phenomena observed is such and such were the case. In the Einstein example it would be what would we think would be likely to be observed if mass warps spacetime.

I don't think there are any strict laws associated with this type of conjecture. With deductive logic the main law is consistency, that the conclusion(s) follow strictly from the premises. _

But notice, that is an argument I’ve put forward - there’s nothing directly corresponding to such a conjecture in Davidson’s paper or the articles on supervenience that we’ve been referencing. It may be completely off target for some reason that I haven’t understood yet. I have to allow that possibility. — Wayfarer

Sure, I've made that point myself more than 25 years ago in arguments with an eliminative materialist who used to attend the same classes in philosophy at Sydney University Centre for Continuing Education as I was at the time, but as I say I don't see it so much as an argument or conjecture, but rather as simply pointing out something that is unarguably true.

As I said, I'm not so confident as I once was regarding the implications for materialism. I'm not confident it constitutes a "slam dunk" refutation of materialism or even of eliminative materialism. Also, I am not involved in any moral crusade against philosophical materialism. although I do definitely see materialism in the sense of the aim of life being seen as accumulating wealth and "goods" as a massive problem.

Just as philosophers suddenly get really accessible when they write about aesthetics, the SEP article on supervenience in ethics is much easier to understand than the main article. Some excerpts:

Supervenience relations are covariance relations that have three logical features: they are reflexive, transitive, and non-symmetric. The claim that supervenience is reflexive means that every set of properties supervenes on itself: for any class of properties A, there can be no difference in the A-properties without a difference in the A-properties. The claim that supervenience is transitive means that: if the A-properties supervene on the B-properties, and the B-properties supervene on the C-properties, then the A-properties supervene on the C-properties. The claim that supervenience is non-symmetric means that supervenience is compatible with either symmetry (A supervenes on B and B supervenes on A; as in the case of the ethical and itself) or asymmetry (A supervenes on B but B does not supervene on A; as may be the case between the biological and the microphysical). — SEP article on supervenience in ethics

These claims reflect how use of the word ‘supervenience’ has come to be usefully regimented in contemporary metaphysics. It is worth emphasizing this point, because there is a significant history of the word being used in ways that depart from this contemporary orthodoxy. For example, for a time it was quite common both in metaphysics and in ethics for ‘supervenience’ to be used to mark an asymmetrical dependence relation. Such uses are, however, inconsistent with the contemporary regimentation. This is a point about terminological clarity, not a substantive barrier to discussing such asymmetric relations. For example, one could name the asymmetric relation that holds when A supervenes on B but B does not supervene on A. Or one could name the relation that holds when the supervenience of A on B is accompanied by an adequate explanation. One influential variant of the latter sort of explanatory relation has been dubbed ‘superdupervenience’ (Horgan 1993, 566). More recently, many philosophers have suggested that a certain asymmetric dependence relation—grounding—is of central importance to our metaphysical theorizing. (For discussion, see the entry on metaphysical grounding.)

Given the standard contemporary regimentation, however, supervenience claims state a certain pattern of covariation between classes of properties, they do not purport to explain that pattern, as a grounding or superdupervenience thesis would (compare DePaul 1987). This point is crucial to several arguments from ethical supervenience, as we will see below.

These clarifying remarks put us in a position to introduce four central questions that can be used to develop alternative supervenience theses:

How can we best characterize which properties the ethical properties supervene on?
Should we characterize the supervenience of the ethical in terms of facts about individuals, or about whole possible worlds?
What is the modal strength of the supervenience relation? Does it hold only across worlds with the same laws of nature as ours, or across all metaphysically, conceptually, or “normatively” possible worlds?
Thus far I have introduced ethical supervenience as a thesis about what there is; is it better stated as a commitment concerning combinations of our ethical attitudes? — SEP article on ethical supervenience

We might have to do some superdupervenience here shortly.

I've never come across the word "supervenes" in mathematics, so I assume it is more a philosophical term. However, what comes to mind is the reliance on fundamental set theory as a foundation for all of mathematics. Many if not most mathematicians in classical analysis, say, don't even think of the intricacies of set theory while involved in research. But what they are doing supervenes upon set theory.

I suppose.

I think this is what I was saying above to T Clark, but one of the problems often brought forth by the substance dualist is that there is not empirical proof that brain state X always causes behavior Y because fMRI results do not show that for every instance of behavior Y the exact areas of the brain show activity.

What this would mean is that brain activity supervenes with behavioral activity 100% of the time, but the precise brain activity down to the neuronal level is variable. That means that for person A who is an exact replica of person B (down the neuronal level), the substance dualist would not necessarily commit that the two would exhibit exact behaviors. Sometimes brain state A yields behavior X and sometimes Y. — Hanover

Going through this thread and it seemed worth pointing out that fMRI doesn't come anywhere near individual neuron level resolution. The last I looked it was around 50,000 neurons per voxel (volume-pixel). It is to be expected that fMRI voxels are variable because the spatial resolution (not to mention the temporal resolution) is far too poor to detect the subtleties of what is occurring.