Supervenience, Entailment, and Vague Objects

Abstract

Not long ago came into common use, the relation of supervenience is rapidly gaining in popularity. At the same time, its logical nature, in particular its possible correlations with such fundamental logical relation as entailment, remains unresolved and needs clarification. In this paper, I compare these two relations and outline a new approach to formal explication of supervenience. In so doing, I employ as main sources two conceptions: of intensional semantics, and impossible object descriptions as its core part, introduced in section 3, and of relevant consequence relation, briefly described in section 4, where I also delineate a new entailment interpretation of supevenience. Thus, quite naturally we arrive at contradictory and incomplete descriptions of objects, and that way, uncertainty comes into play. Equally, it allows to propose a tentative definition of supervenience without referring to the terminology of the possible worlds semantics.