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Supervenience

A property is said to supervene upon a system (or emerge from it) when the property is of a higher order than any of the physical structures or processes that underly it are inadequate to explain it. Such properties are seen as universal, in that for all systems that display a set of physical properties [A], the higher order supervenient property [B] will attain.

Supervenience is not strictly reductionist, in that the higher order property cannot be reduced to the substrate properties, but is presumed to be a product of the substrate properties in the above formulation. Put another way, "there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference" with regard to supervenient properties.

Philosophically, the term is aligned with emergentists like Lloyd Morgan, and speaks specifically to the relationship between substrate properties and the emergent property. The supervenient property depends upon the substrate properties, and do not exist in the absence of them.

Web Resources On Supervenience

Supervenience
Supervenience and Determinism

Book Resources On Supervenience

Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays by Jaegwon Kim, Ernest Sosa (eds.).
Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings by David J. Chalmers (ed.)

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