Armstrong’s Supervenience and Ontological Dependence

In Armstrong’s mature ontology, the one in which states of affairs and truthmaking gain center stage, there is a distinctive and pervasive appeal to a certain notion of supervenience, on the basis of which he feels entitled to claim that the supervenient is not additional to the subvenient. Armstrong’s way of speaking may suggest that he does not take himself to be ontologically committed to supervenient entities, namely, in his opinion, mereological aggregates, sets, properties and relations of the manifest image of the world, internal relations, kinds, dispositions, and more. However, as many commentators have been quick to point out, his world view thus appears to be incoherent. It has also been suggested that Armstrong simply takes the supervenient as partially or totally overlapping with the subvenient. However, many of Armstrong’s claims about supervenient entities can hardly be interpreted in this mereological fashion. Alternatively, Correia, Schaffer and Calemi have hinted at another interpretation, according to which Armstrong presents a hierarchical ontology, wherein the supervenient is ontologically dependent on the subvenient. However, this interpretation too has its own difficulties. This paper explores it in detail, by surveying most of what Armstrong takes to be supervenient and trying to discern when it is really appropriate to view the supervenient as ontologically dependent on the subvenient. This reconstruction leads to a couple of options regarding how to conceive of the tie that brings together universals and particulars in a state of affairs, namely a brute fact approach and fact infinitism.