<philosophical yterminology> belonging to or characteristic of something only in virtue of its having other features. Although a supervenient property cannot be defined in terms of, or reduced to, the properties on which it supervenes, nothing possess (or can possess) those properties without also having it. In this sense, Hare supposed that moral properties are supervenient with respect to straightforward descriptions of human conduct, and Davidson proposes that mental events supervene on physical events. Recommended Reading: R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Clarendon, 1991); Supervenience, ed. by Jaegwon Kim (Ashgate, 2001); Gabriel M. A. Segal, A Slim Book About Narrow Content (MIT, 2000); Supervenience: New Essays, ed. by Elias E. Savellos and Umit D. Yalcin (Cambridge, 1995); Jaegwon Kim, Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, 1993); and Reality and Humean Supervenience: Essays on the Philosophy of David Lewis, ed. by Gerhard Preyer and Frank Siebelt (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
[A Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names
Try this search on OneLook / Google