A working word that still does no work

A few years back, I wrote a post in which I argued that the term "supervenience" doesn't do the work that physicalists seem to think it does (see here). I have been reading the essay on physicalism in The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind written by Andrew Melnyk. In it he makes the same observation I was trying to make.

"...any supervenience claim that has been pressed into service as a formulation of physicalism is merely a variation on the theme that the physical way things are necessitates the non-physical way things are. But there is no explanation, entailed by the supervenience claim itself, for how and why this necessitation occurs; so, for all that the supervenience claim itself says, the necessitation of the non-physical by the physical might constitute a brute modal fact; but if, for all that the supervenience claim itself says, the necessitation of the non-physical by the physical might simply be a brute modal fact, then the supervenience claim itself yields no intuitively satisfactory sense in which the mental is physical" (page 71; The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind; 2003; here).

The admission here is that "...there is no explanation, entailed by the supervenience claim itself, for how and why this necessitation occurs..." The supervenience claim does not tells us how or why the mental supervenes on the physical, much less how the mental is physical. It is just a brute assertion with no explanatory force.

It may be that the use of "supervenience" is on the wane due to the fact that it doesn't really tell us anything, except that physicalists want, very badly, for the mental to be physical. Whatever the case, "supervenience" is still a word that does no work.