Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Introductory Paragraph

It is now very well understood in philosophy that the relationships that related but distinct theories bear to one another is a matter of enormous complexity. Whatever the relationship is between a theory and another that somehow or other "grounds" it, the terms 'reduction' and 'supervenience¹' and 'emergence' are all so broad in their sweep that to say that one theory reduces to another, is supervenient on another or emerges from another is never more than to begin to tell the truly interesting story: Exactly how is the one theory related the other. Often much of the most interesting philosophical insight resides in the details of the specific cases rather than in categorizing some particular inter-theoretic relation into one of the three broad categories mentioned.