Neil Dewar (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
This paper considers the following question: what is the relationship between supervenience and reduction? I investigate this formally, first by introducing a recent argument by Christian List to the effect that one can have supervenience without reduction; then by considering how the notion of Nagelian reduction can be related to the formal apparatus of definability and translation theory; then by showing how, in the context of propositional theories, topological constraints on supervenience serve to enforce reducibility; and finally, how constraints derived from the theory of ultraproducts can enforce reducibility in the context of first-order theories.
