Abstract

According to The Argument from Explaining Supervenience (Chapter 3), considerations about monism matter because they help explain why the main traditional monist theories—physicalism, idealism, and neutral monism—entail supervenience theses. In this chapter, that argument is defended against three objections: that considerations about monism are not needed to explain that entailment; that there is no such entailment; and that the assumption that grounding entails supervenience, which The Argument involves, is false. It is argued that all three objections trace to misunderstandings about the commitments of physicalism and its rivals—commitments that derive at least partly from those theories’ being versions of monism.