Two criticisms of Davidson's argument for monism are presented. The first is that there is no obvious way for the anomalism of the mental to do any work in his argument. Certain implicit premises, on the other hand, entail monism independently of the anomalism of the mental, but they are question-begging. The second criticism is that even if Davidson's argument is sound, the variety of monism that emerges is extremely weak at best. I show that by constructing ontologically ``hybrid'' events (...) that are consistent with the premises and assumptions of Davidson's argument, but entail ontological dualism.My guess is thatif you want to get a lot of physicalism out [ofDavidson's argument], you're going to have to put a lot of physicalism in.Jerry Fodor 1989, 159. (shrink)

WHAT IS PRESENT TO THE MIND? Donald DAVIDSON The University of California at Berkeley There is a sense in which anything we think about is, ...

identity theory , usually attributed to J.J.C. Smart (Smart, 1959) and U.T. Place (Place, 1956), claimed that kinds of mental states are identical to kinds of brain states. Sensations of pain, for instance, were said to be identical to the firing of C-fibres or some such type of neurological state. According to this view, then, pain, conceived as a _kind_ of mental state, is said to be _reduced_ to a certain kind of neurological state. The reduction envisaged here was modelled (...) on the kind of reduction seen in other areas of the sciences. For instance, lightning can be said to be reduced to a rapid discharge of electrons in the atmosphere. When such a reduction is made scientists are not saying that there are two phenomena that are correlated, but rather that lightning is. (shrink)

A phenomenon “emerges” when a concept is instantiated for the first time: hence emergence is relative to a set of concepts. Propositional thought and language emerge together. It is proposed that the degree of complexity of an object language relative to a given metalanguage can be gauged by the number of ways it can be translated into that metalanguage: in analogy with other forms of measurement, the more ways the object language can be translated into the metalanguage, the less powerful (...) the conceptual resources of the object language. (shrink)

Davidson’s anomalous monism, his argument for the identity between mental and physical event tokens, has been frequently attacked, usually demanding a higher degree of physicalist commitment. My objection runs in the opposite direction: the identities inferred by Davidson from mental causation, the nomological character of causality and the anomaly of the mental are philosophically problematic and, more dramatically, incompatible with his famous argument against the third dogma of empiricism, the separation of content from conceptual scheme. Given the anomaly of the (...) mental and the absence of psychophysical laws, there are no conceptual resources to relate mental and physical predicates. We fall in the third dogma if we claim that the very same token event is mental and physical. One of the premises must be rejected: I will claim that we do not need a law to subsume cause and effect to be entitled to speak of causation. Davidson has never offered an argument to back this premise. Against such a dogma I will sketch some ideas pointing towards a different conception of causality, singularist and undetachable from explanatory practices. (shrink)

Despite the fact that Davidson's theory of the causal relata is crucial to his response to the problem of mental causation - that of anomalous monism - it is commonly overlooked within discussions of his position. Anomalous monism is accused of entailing property epiphenomenalism, but given Davidson's understanding of the causal relata, such accusations are wholly misguided. There are, I suggest, two different forms of property epiphenomenalism. The first understands the term 'property' in an ontological sense, the second in a (...) linguistic sense. Anomalous monism cannot plausibly be accused of either. The first cannot legitimately be applied to anomalous monism as it is incompatible with Davidson's ontology. And accusations of predicate epiphenomenalism, although consistent with Davidson's ontology, are ungrounded regarding Davidson's anomalous monism. Philosophers of mind have mislocated the problem with Davidson's anomalous monism, which in fact lies with the implausible theory of the causal relata upon which it rests. (shrink)

One central but unrecognized strand of the complex debate between W. V. Quine and Donald Davidson over the status of psychology as a science turns on their disagreement concerning the compatibility of strict psychophysical, semantic-determining laws with the possibility of error. That disagreement in turn underlies their opposing views on the location of semantic determinants: proximal (on bodily surfaces) or distal (in the external world). This paper articulates these two disputes, their wider context, and argues that both are fundamentally misconceived. (...) There is no special tension between error and strict semantic-determining laws; moreover, the purported bearing of that issue on the dispute over the location of semantic determinants depends upon a mistaken conception of the relation between the nomic status of generalizations and degree of distance between explanans and it explananda. Finally, the wider significance of these conclusions for related contemporary debates is noted. And independent considerations about the possibility of communication, also present in Quine's and Davidson's thinking, are brought to bear on the question of the location of semantic determinants. (shrink)

Donald Davidsons classic argument for the impossibility of reducing mental events to physicallistic ones is analyzed and formalized in relational logic. This makes evident the scope of Davidsons argument, and shows that he is essentially offering a negative transcendental argument, i.e., and argument to the impossibility of certain kinds of logical relations. Some final speculations are offered as to why such a move might, nevertheless, have a measure of plausibility.

This paper argues that Davidson's claim that the connection between belief and the "constitutive ideal of rationality" precludes the possibility of any type-type identities between mental and physical events relies on blurring the distinction between two ways of understanding this "constitutive ideal", and that no consistent understanding the constitutive ideal allows it to play the dialectical role Davidson intends for it.

Davidson has argued that there can be no laws linking psychological states with physical states. I stress that this argument depends crucially on there being no purely psychological laws. All of this has to do with the holism and indeterminacy of the psychological domain. I criticize this claim by showing how Davidson misconstrues the role of ceteris paribus clauses in psychological explanation. Using a model of how ceteris paribus clauses operate derived from Lakatos, I argue that if Davidson is correct, (...) then there can be no purely physical laws either. This is illustrated with a case from immunology involving interferons. Since there clearly are physical laws, Davidson cannot be correct. (shrink)

Nearly 30 years have passed since Donald Davidson first presented his ar- gument against the possibility of psychophysical laws in “Mental Events”. The argument applies to intentional rather than phenomenal properties, so whenever I refer to mental properties and to psychophysical laws it should be understood that I mean intentional properties and laws relating them to physical properties. No consensus has emerged over what the argument actually is, and the subsequent versions of it presented by Davidson show significant differences. But (...) many have been inclined to agree with the spirit of the argument and with its conclusion. (shrink)

The Logical Reconstruction of the World (Aufbau) is oneof the major works of Rudolf Carnap in which he attempts to putan end to some of the traditional disputes in epistemologyby using what he calls `construction theory'. According tothis theory, one or more constructional systems can be designedin which all the scientific and pre-scientific objects are logicallymade out of a limited number of basic elements. Carnap introducessome options for the basis of this system and chooses thedomain of the autopsychological, i.e., the (...) domain of privateelementary experiences, among them and tries to construct all theconcepts out of them. This phenomenalistic reduction sometimes isseen as embracing a Cartesian dualism of mind and body or even amentalistic monism. However, in this paper, I shall try to showthat the traditional dualist-monist debates are among those disputesthat the construction theory aims to get rid of. I will show thatCarnap's position on the mind-body problem is really close towhat Davidson later termed as `Anomalous Monism' and that thisis why Carnap fails to complete his logical construction at a crucial step. Whenever possible, logicalconstructions are to be substituted forinferred entities. (shrink)

In ‘Mental Events’ Donald Davidson argued for the anomalism of the mental on the basis of the operation of incompatible constitutive principles in the mental and physical domains. Many years later, he has suggested that externalism provides further support for the anomalism of the mental. I examine the basis for that claim. The answer to the question in the title will be a qualified ‘Yes’. That is an important result in the metaphysics of mind and an interesting consequence of externalism.

If mental anomalism is to be interpreted as a thesisunique to psychology, the anomalousness must begrounded in some feature unique to the mental,presumably its rational nature. While the ground forsuch arguments from normativity has been notoriouslyslippery terrain, there are two recently influentialstrategies which make the argument precise. The firstis to deny the possibility of psychophysical bridgelaws because of the different constitutive essences ofmental and physical laws, and the second is to arguethat mental anomalism follows from the uncodifiabilityof rationality. In this (...) paper I argue that bothstrategies fail – the latter because it conflates primafacie and all things considered rationality and theformer because it rests on a false premise, theprinciple of the rational character of belief. Idistinguish four different formulations of thisprinciple and argue that those formulations which areplausible cannot support the argument for mentalanomalism. (shrink)