Yet More Anomalous Monism

Posted on April 20, 2009
Filed Under Davidson, Philosophy | 3 Comments

I discussed yesterday my thinking about Davidson’s Anomalous Monism. I said that the problem is that causality in one set of descriptions (the mental) picks out occurrences in an unstable fashion. That is it is basically probabilistic. He contrasts this with physical law which is strict and deterministic. Thus one kind of law (probabilistic) can’t be reduced to the other.

Here’s my problem. What if the kind of laws he ascribes to the physical isn’t a part of physical description? That is what if physical law is also a matter of probability? Of course in terms of current physical theory that’s not the case. QM, which is often brought up, has probabilities yet consists of deterministic laws controlling the probabilities. So it isn’t an example of a probabilistic law. Rather it is a deterministic law about probabilities. But consider the ideal gas law. That seems probabilistic. There are many like this.

What I’m suggesting is that all this concern assumes that physicalism has for its physical law determinism. Can’t one ontologically be a physicalist while thinking that laws aren’t strict? That they are generally true? If so, then does that resolve a lot of the problems? (Of course it would undermine the fundamental argument Davidson makes for AM)

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  4. The Laws of the Laws of Thought
  5. Laws & Facts
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Comments

3 Responses to “Yet More Anomalous Monism”

This ignores what Davidson thinks is actually special about the mental. It’s not just that it lacks strict laws; that’s also true of geology and of botany. See again the things I mentioned in the comment I just posted on the other post: “Three Varieties of Knowledge”, the appendix to TLH, and McDowell’s “The Constitutive Ideal of Rationality” (in “Having the World in View”, which is a great collection).

Davidson addresses QM and tries to defend the “Nomological character of causality” in “Laws and Causes” in TLH. I find that article uncommonly obscure, but he doesn’t think that QM is any trouble for “the cause-law thesis”.

But the important point is that it’s not just the lack of strict laws that make the mental special. What’s special is the “constitutive ideal of rationality”, the fact that using a mental vocabulary to describe someone is to position them in Sellars’s “space of reasons”. (Sadly, this is one of the few McDowell articles I don’t have in PDF.)

Yeah, I don’t think QM is of itself a problem. It is deterministic and just leaves open some areas that aren’t. Given particular boundaries conditions you have a deterministic Hamiltonian though. The problem with QM isn’t QM itself but QM plus GR. That is QM has exceptions (and is thus like mental laws for Davidson) and GR does as well. Perhaps some as yet unthought ideal theory won’t have this problem.

I certainly agree with what is fundamental about the mental in Davidson. I’m sorry I conveyed otherwise in my prior post. What I’m more curious about is what I see as a problem of causality and law which then besets AM. That is I don’t think there are any laws of the sort Davidson thinks physicalism entails. (This is perhaps the Peircean in me which sees such physical laws as habits, but still open to an element of chance he picks up from the Epicurean notion of swerve)

The tendency in physics is to acknowledge that much of what we call law isn’t really. It’s just a chance configuration into a particular symmetry. Thus you rewind the universe to the early moments and press play and you might get a lot of different “laws.” Yet there is this faith that there is some meta-law akin to QM or GR that is fundamental. It’s just not clear to me that even if there is such a law (and I’m skeptical) that it would be the sort that would function in the fashion Davidson requires.

That’s not just because of the element of chance in law (as opposed to described by law as in QM). Rather it is because of a kind of ontological holism that would make it impossible to talk about singular events isolated from other events with causes. I’m not sure how much physics you have but this is the idea that even in QM you could write the universe as a whole as a Hamiltonian and its hard to think of how one time slice of the Hamiltonian causes an other. Rather it all just evolves. Certainly to pick out any Event would be erroneous due to the holism.

So this problem of ontological holism which is a pretty significant factor in most physical theory can allow Davidson’s project to work.

I should add that I’ve not looked up to see if Davidson addresses this issue. I don’t recall him addressing it in his comments on QM. However I should actually have looked that up before writing the above.

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