This isn't the answer to Blake's question from the other thread. Rather this sets it up somewhat. I've discussed Davidson's anomalous monism before. What I want to get at is one of the central points of his theory and how it relates to some of the issues in Blake's argument. (Without, I caution, answering the argument - I'll save that for a future post)
First let's repeat the basic statement of Davidson's position:
There are no such things as minds but people have mental properties, which is to say that certain psychological predicates are true of them. These properties are constantly changing, and such changes are mental events. ... Mental events are, in my view, physical (which is not, of course, to say that they are not mental). This is a thesis that follows from certain premises, all of which I think are true. The main premises are:
(1) All mental events are causally related to physical events. For example, beliefs and desires cause agents to act, and actions cause changes in the physical world. Events in the physical world often cause us to alter our beliefs, intentions, and desires.
(2) If two events are related as cause and effect, there is a strict law under which they may be subsumed. This means: cause and effect have descriptions which instantiate a strict law. A 'strict' law is on which makes no use of open-ended escape clauses such as 'other things being equal.' Thus such laws must belong to a closed system: whatever can affect the system must be included in it.
(3) There are no strict psychophysical laws (laws connecting mental events under their mental descriptions with physical events under their physical descriptions.
(Donald Davidson, Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, 231)
Now probably the best essay Davidson wrote on this is "Psychology as Philosophy" in Essays on Actions and Events. I'll be referring to that a lot.
Now the thing to keep in mind is that Davidson's approach is, in some ways, a response to Wittgenstein's position that reasons simply can't be causes. I'm not well enough read on Wittgenstein to bring that position to play towards Blake's argument against determinism. Davidson's approach seems much more intriguing though. Basically Davidson is returning to the old Kantian approach to reconciling determinism and free will. (I'd discussed that in connection to Heidegger last year) Now I'm not sure Kant's approach intrinsically works. But it's worth quoting Kant to set up the problem.
. . .it is as impossible for the subtlest philosophy as for the commonest reasoning to argue freedom away. Philosophy must therefore assume that no true contradiction will be found between freedom and natural necessity in the same human actions, for it cannot give up the idea of nature any more than that of freedom. Hence even if we should never be able to conceive how freedom is possible, at least this apparent contradiction must be convincingly eradicated. For if the thought of freedom contradicts itself or nature. . .it would have to be surrendered in competition with natural necessity. (Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, 75-6 as quoted in Davidson, "Mental Events," Essays on Actions and Events, 207)
The approach Davidson is taking with anomalous monism is basically to switch the talk to descriptions. Thus he affirms that all events can be described physically and that there are physical laws determining these events. (He doesn't require strict determinism, but would say that say an ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics has strictly determined bounds on probabilities - the wave function. So it is a kind of determinism still.) The unique approach he takes is found in the third point of his three principles for anamolous monism. That is that there aren't laws dealing with psychology. It's not that there aren't lawlike events underneath. Just that our psychological descriptions can't be fit into laws and thus can't be described deterministically. To talk about determinism one has to stay in the physical world. And this is, as you probably notice, pretty much the Kantian view switched into the logic of language.
Basically what Davidson does is separate out physical verbs from mental verbs. Mental terms are those like "believing" or "perceiving." "Such verbs are characterized by the fact that they sometimes feature in sentences with subjects that refer to persons and are completed by embedded sentences in which the usual rules of substitution appear to break down. This criterion is not precise, since I do not want to include these verbs when they occur in contexts that are fully extensional. ('He knows Paris,' 'He perceives the moon' may be cases), nor exclude them whenever they are not followed by embedded sentences. An alternative characterization of the desired class of mental verbs might be that they are psychological verbs as used when they create apparently nonextensional contexts." (Davidson, 210-1) The characteristic of the mental is that it includes intentionality. (Davidson argues persuasively that this would also include perceptions and things like pains - but I'll skip that for the sake of argument)
Davidson's argument then becomes the following:
Causality and identity are relations between individual events no matter how described. But laws are linguistic; and so events can instantiate laws, and hence be explained or predicted in the light of laws, only as those events are described in one way or another way. The principle of causal interaction deals with events in extension and is therefore blind to the mental-physical dichotomy. The principle of the anomalism of the mental [principle 3 above] concerns events described as mental, for events are mental only as described. The principle of the nomological character of causality [principle 2 above] must be read carefully: it says that when events are related as cause and effect, they have descriptions that instantiate a law. It does not say that every true singular statement of causality instantiates a law. (ibid, 215)
The kicker of course is principle 3. Should we accept it? Clearly not everyone will. Basically Davidson makes the argument that our psychological understanding is always general in the sense of being generally true. We don't have the kind of replicailty that one has in the physical sciences. The controversial move is his argument that this is essentially true and not just practically true right now. Davidson spends time in the rest of the essay "Mental Events" trying to do this. It's a complex paper and I'll not try to summarize it.
The basic approach though is to emphasize what he calls the "holistic character of the cognitive field. Any effort at increasing the accuracy and power of a theory of behaviour forces us to bring more and more of the whole system of the agent's beliefs and motives directly into account." (231) This just doesn't happen in physics or chemistry (except in some interpretations of quantum mechanics). We can effectively reduce physical systems to parts and explain those parts without reference to the whole. To formulate a physical law, I simply don't need to take into account the whole.
Now clearly this aspect of anti-reductionism will be attractive to some. What's interesting though is that this ends up being an issue of descriptions and translation. To translate from mental talk to physical talk one ends up having to tell more and more about the universe. Since our physical talk about causality doesn't do this, one can't talk about causality in the mental. It would end up just being talk about how the universe as a whole evolves deterministically. While Davidson doesn't bring up the point, from a physical view one might say that talk of the mental as deterministic requires that one calculate the wavefunction for the whole universe. (If you're familiar with quantum mechanics you'll know what that means - if not, just forget it. Explaining it would just confuse matters.)
I think that Davidson's externalism can be brought to bear in this as well. Forgive me if I give this a slightly phenomenological twist. Recall that the characteristic of the mental is intentionality. Yet our intentionality is directed towards things. But things are outside of my brain. Thus a description of the mental can't be reduced down, neo-Cartesian like, into what is inside me. It intrinsically includes the "outside." Thus all talk about the mental is intrinsically talk about all the objects of intent outside of the brain. This thus naturally flows into the holism Davidson addresses.
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