Abstract
This paper puts the theories of Donald Davidson into conversation with those of Edmund Husserl, arguing that their work can be read as representing different species of a singular kind, with both defending: (1) versions of anomalous monism, and (2) the legitimacy of event explanation by way of intentionality, rationality, and talk of agentive action. Through these they provide an account of the mental that aligns with the physical while also avoiding the mental’s nomological capture, or its reduction to physicalist causality. A demonstration will be provided in closing as to why this Husserlian-Davidson position is worth exploring, as we will utilize their conjunction as a platform for responding to problems raised against anomalous monism and the intentional rationalization of action by behaviorists, eliminativists, pragmatists, and conceptualists. In this manner their paired reading will be shown to enlighten us about the nature of their individual theories, while simultaneously deepening our understanding of the nature of the (1-2) problematic that their theories shared in common.
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Notes
“Heteronomic Naturalism” is a concept found throughout Davidson’s work (1967a, 1968, 1979, 1993a, 1995), and we will be referring to it often. It represents the claim that we can construct “physical laws” that would purport to capture causal relations in sentential form of a singular two-place predicate causal judgment, where this would act as a covering law capturing the relations of these terms in a way that was: necessary, precise, measurable, predictable, codifiable, etc.
It is useful for what is to come to remember that his theory of mind grows out of his theory of action; where the later was what was of primary importance and so drove his considerations. I thank a referee pointing this out. We will discuss this in greater detail in Part I, Sect. 2.
For further description: (a) Physical Events – the physical-material-natural which is identified alternatively with the nomological, functionalism, eliminativism, the macroscopic, 3rd person, scientific fact/law, and (b) Mental Events – the rational-intentional which is identified alternatively with intentions, propositional attitudes, conceptual frameworks, memory, cognitive holism, broad generalizations. See also: Yalowitz (1998) and Malpas (1992, 2011).
Placed in another vocabulary, this resolves in part Kant’s third antinomy, allowing for freedom and self-rule, while resisting nomological capture by physicalism (A451-2/B479-80); see Hud (2002) for the Kant-Davidson connection.
This really comes out in the case of “accidentally tripping and spilling one’s morning coffee on the rug.” When the homeowner returns, and asks incredulously what happened to their ten-thousand dollar rug, they are not interested in questions of physics, liquid dynamics, saturation qualities, the stain capacity of coffee, etc.
Across these cases, or rather behind them is a connected thesis we unfortunately can’t explore here regarding his broader argument in favor of “mental holism,” found in cases like the famed Swampman (1987) thought experiment. Such would afford further comparison with Husserl (e.g. the transcendental ego). Davidson’s point with Mental Holism is that our mental life is a mereological and temporally continuous, integral-whole (see: Malpas 2011 and LePore 1986). This is an insight shared by Husserl - present as early as the time-consciousness lectures of 1905.
This ties into a core thesis of Davidson’s theory of action that is called the “Accordion Effect” (Davidson 1968). Here it is claimed that actions are inherently telescoped or nested, representing something that is at once a singular whole and compound. This means any given action can be simultaneously described and explained in broad-general terms and in precise-specific terms, allowing us to squeeze-out as much detail as is practically desired/called for. This shows further complexity, as for the same finite number of PE we find a variant number of equally as adequate ME can be accorded to such.
The precise source of these quotes is as follows – Ideas II (2000) Part 3, Ch. 3, Sect. 62 and Sect. 63, titled, “Psychophysical Parallelism and Interaction,” and Part 3, Ch. 1, Sects. 48-53, Ch. 2, Sects. 55-56. The source of the (a) and (b) distinction is found in the same sections, as well as Ideas II (2000) Part 1, Ch. 1-3, Part 2, Introduction and Ch. 1-3, and Part 3, Ch. 1 and Ch. 3. This theme remains at the end of his life as well: Crisis of the European Sciences (1970) Part IIIa, Sects. 51-54.
See fn. 8 for these references. For Husserl, “Spirit ‘belongs’ to nature as joined to a body but it is not itself nature; ‘the spirit has its effects’ in nature and yet it does not exercise there any causality in the sense of nature as spirit is not related to real circumstances residing within nature but rather stands related to real circumstances existing in the surrounding [spiritual] world (not nature).” Ideas II (2000) Part 2, Ch. 2-3, and Part 3, Ch. 3, Sects. 62-64.
Person’s ego-life on Husserl’s account is unitary in that it represents a pervasive synthetic unity which is characterized by its continual dynamic shifting; with him referring to us as “unitary human beings.” This closely resembles Davidson’s work on mental holism (e.g. Swampman); see fn. 6 and 8.
See fn. 8, and Ideas II (2000) Part 2, Ch. 2-3.
ibid. Part 2, Ch. 3, and Part 3, Ch. 1 and 3; or see Logical Investigations (2001) Vol. 2, Inv. 5, Ch. 3-5 for an earlier depiction of the same conception.
Ideas II (2000) Part 1, Ch. 1 Ch. 2-3. For a list, this is the agent as: objective, mathematical, nomological, a function, a system, a machine, as external thing, as grasped through determinism, physicalism, functionalism, or naturalism.
ibid. Part 1, Ch. 1, Sects. 2-4, 6-11, Ch. 2, sec, 12-15, or The Crisis of the European Sciences (1970) Part 2, Sect. 9, Part 3a, Sects. 33-34. The danger for Husserl is a sort of self-forgetting that occurs when we enter into objective, abstract intersubjective, objective modes of world interpretation. This is later echoed in the late Heidegger and his work on art, technology, dwelling, language, etc.
There is no nomological law here, as the capacity to be flicked will vary, and operates according to a motivational logic of normalcy, set at the level of physiological grip; see: Ideas II (2000) Part 1, Ch. 1, Sects. 4-7, Ch. 3, Sect. 18.
ibid. Part 1, Ch. 1, Sects. 4-7, Ch. 3, Sect. 18. Conveniently this creates lots of work for phenomenologists.
Schutz (1967).
This is at the heart of the Logical Investigations (1900/01), Ideas I (1913), the Cartesian Meditations (1931) and Crisis (1936).
As Husserl (2000) stresses, we do not experience any of this as something merely “annexed to the body,” or as itself a “natural-physical” relation of objective processes (Part 3, Ch. 2, Sect. 56). It is a phenomenological monism with two simultaneous aspects. This is also found in Husserl (1970) Part IIIB sec. 60-67, and Appendix I-III.
For Husserl, the heteronomic laws of (a) unfold at a lower-level physiological sides of experience are association, habit, disposition, sensation/sensory mechanisms. See fn. 8 for reference.
Husserl gives over two dozen reasons or arguments for this thesis, here are four: (i) genetic fallacy – (a) misses how it is secondary to, and grounded within, and so dependent upon (b), and so here the founded/founding relations of dependency and necessity are flagrantly gone against,(b), (ii) regional nesting fallacy – (a) misses how different domains have different scopes of objects, wherein, all regions of (a) are ultimately a sub-set of (b), naturalistic fallacy – (a) befalls the same mistake as psychologism, wherein it conflates the distinction between empirical probability and logical necessity, such that the former can’t supply the later, as this is something it itself presupposed, (iv) lifeworld crisis thesis – the eclipse of (b) to (a) and its subsequent erasure will lead to a de-mooring of instrumental reason from its embeddedness in the world, leading to the oblong wobbling motion of social institutions and subsequent existential crisis in the later half of the 20th century.
Ideas II (2000) Part 1, Ch. 2-3 or Logical Investigations (2001) Vol. 2, Inv. 5, Ch. 3-5; see Thao (1986) for the most intricate and phenomenological presentation of this. Recall, this is the body as (a) and an object of scientism and naturalism, looking at agency as a physicalist thing (i.e. as nomological, biological, and kinetic).
ibid. Part 3, Ch. 3 and Part 1, Ch. 2-3, Part 2, Introduction. His account of (b) builds out ever more robust levels of “accomplishment,” culminating in discussions of “spiritual significance” (i.e. socio-historical cultural sedimentations of meaning), as Husserl connects up the motivational intentionality of the lived-body to discussions of our larger socio-historical environments. These are the pre-existing cognitive furniture of the world one is born into, conditioning/determining our subjective experience of the world. This becomes ever more important to his investigations; e.g. Cartesian Mediations (1931) and the Crisis (1936).
This again recalls Schutz’s (1967) reframing of Husserl’s position.
This comes from Ideas II, the manuscripts on which Merleau-Ponty would famously teach himself phenomenology, where in this light, the sense of “chiasm,” “invisibility,” “reversibility,” etc., he develops late in his life was already richly present in Husserl.
There are many others, these are the three we will be looking at here, for others: e.g. the cultural-spiritual.
Ideas II (2000) Part 1, Ch. 3, Sect. 18, Part 3, Ch. 3, Sects. 62-64; or Ideas I (2002) Part 3, Ch. 4, Sects. 97-122.
You could call this the 42nd dogma of empiricism.
As with quantum mechanics and general theory of relativism, so too with the mind and body.
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Wagnon, D. Donald Davidson as an Analytic Phenomenologist: Husserl and Davidson on Anomalous Monism and Action. Phenom Cogn Sci (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-023-09904-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-023-09904-3