Supervenience for operators

Abstract

The modal primitivist who takes a sentential possibility operator '◇' as her only modal resource can provide adequate representations of the familiar concepts of weak, strong and global supervenience. The primitivist representations of these concepts can be applied to provide adequate interpretations of specific supervenience theses which will be considered. Moreover the modal primitivist is no better and no worse placed than the genuine modal realist to present supervenience as a simple and unified notion. Therefore, Lewis is unjustified in claiming that a genuine modal realist approach to the analysis of the concept of supervenience is superior to a modal primitivist approach. © 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers.