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Undermining Undermined: Why Humean Supervenience Never Needed to Be Debugged (Even If It's a Necessary Truth)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

John T. Roberts
John T. Roberts*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
*
†Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, C.B. #3125, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599; email: jtrosap@email.unc.edu.
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Abstract

The existence of “undermining futures” appears to show that a contradiction can be deduced from the conjunction of Humean supervenience (HS) about chance and the Principal Principle. A number of strategies for rescuing HS from this problem have been proposed recently. In this paper, a novel way of defending HS from the threat is presented, and it is argued that this defense has advantages not shared by others. In particular, it requires no revisionism about chance, and it is equally available to defenders of HS who hold HS to be necessary and those who hold it to be contingent.

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Footnotes

‡

I would like to thank Joe Camp, John Earman, and Brie Gertler for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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