Mental Causation Inc. Anomalous Monism Notes

Non-Reductive Physicalism & Mental Causation

‘Mental Events’ – Donald Davidson

• “[T]he causal dependence, and the anomalousness, of mental events are undeniable facts.”

  • Nomos = law, so anomalous = not conforming to a law

• Wants to show there isn’t a contradiction between these 3 principles¹:

  • 1. At least some mental events interact causally with physical events (Principle of Causal Interaction).

  • 2. Where there is causality, there must be a law. (Principle of the Nomological Character of Causality).

  • 3. There are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained (the Anomalism of the Mental).

• One way of rejecting Davidson’s view would then be to deny 1 by arguing for the epiphenomenalism of the mental (or, show that his view leads to this anyway.)

• He’s a new kind of identity theorist, who doesn’t rely on the existence of psychophysical laws.

• Also a nominalist so doesn’t think there are mental (or any) properties.

• Events can fall under different descriptions. Mental events (which are identical to physical events) can fall under mental or physical descriptions.

  • Thinks the ‘mark of the mental’ is Brentano’s intentionality. Could also argue against him by denying this (Fricker lecture notes).

• Could also criticise D for his definition of mental events: as he admits, it allows ‘the event [any event] which is simultaneous with me noticing that the pencil is rolling across the desk’ to be mental because the description contains mental vocabulary essentially.

  • But he thinks this will “only strengthen” the hypothesis that mental events are physical events.

• Mental events supervene upon, but are not reducible to, physical events.

  • Mental supervenience: any two possible worlds that differ in their mental characteristics must also differ in their physical ones.

• Laws are linguistic, and so events can instantiate laws or fail to instantiate them depending on how they are described. But the relations of causality and identity hold no matter how the events are described.

  • This dissolves the apparent contradiction between the 3 principles.

• “[T]here may be true general statements relating the mental and the physical, statements that have the logical form of a law; but they are not lawlike,” where lawlike statements are “general statements that support counterfactual and subjunctive claims, and are supported by their instances.”

  • Lawlikeness is a matter of degree, but there may be cases beyond debate.

• He believes in the holism of the mental, i.e. that the attribution of mental states cannot be effectuated piecemeal, because such a practice is sensitive to the demands of rationality, which concern collections of mental states.

  • Thinks holism points to both autonomy and anomaly of the mental.

• Homonomic generalization: one positive instances of which give us reason to believe the generalization itself could be improved by adding further provisos, conditions, etc stated in the same general vocabulary as the original.

• Heteronomic generalization: ones that when instantiated may give reason to believe that there is a precise law at work, but one that can be stated only by shifting to a different vocabulary.

  • Most science is heteronomic.

  • Psychophysical statements are heteronomic: “There cannot be tight connections between the realms if each is to retain allegiance to its proper source of evidence.”

• “[N]omological slack between the mental and the physical is essential as long as we conceive of man as a rational animal.”

  • Reasoning: By principle 1, the mental does not constitute a closed system. No psychophysical statement can be built into a strict law because they are heteronomic. Anomalism of the mental follows.

• Finally: “Suppose m, a mental event, caused p, a physical event; then, under some description m and p instantiate a strict law. This law can only be physical, according to the previous paragraph. But if m falls under a physical law, it has a physical description; which is to say it is a physical event. An analogous argument works when a physical event causes a mental event. So every mental event that is causally related to a physical event is a physical event.”

• “Mental events as a class cannot be explained by physical science; particular mental events can when we know particular identities.”

• The anomalism of the mental is a necessary condition for viewing action as autonomous.

‘Psychology as Philosophy’ – Donald Davidson

• “When we attribute a belief, a desire, a goal, an intention or a meaning to an agent, we necessarily operate within a system of concepts in part determined by the structure of beliefs and desires of the agent himself. Short of changing the subject, we cannot escape this feature of the psychological; but this feature has no counterpart in the world of physics.”

  • “The nomological irreducibility of the psychological means, if I am right, that the social sciences cannot be expected to develop in ways exactly parallel to the physical sciences, nor can we expect ever to be able to explain and predict human behaviour with the kind of precision that is possible in principle for physical phenomena.”

  • “[W]e necessarily impose conditions of coherence, rationality, and consistency. These conditions have no echo in physical theory, which is why we can look for no more than rough correlations between psychological and physical phenomena.”

• “Since psychological phenomena do not constitute a closed system, this amounts to saying they are not, even in theory, amenable to precise prediction or subsumption under deterministic laws. The limit thus placed on the social sciences is set not by nature, but by us when we decide to view men as rational agents with goals and purposes, and as subject to moral evaluation.”

‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’ – Davidson

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