This essay is almost entirely devoted to a single influential philosophical paper: Donald Davidson’s ‘Mental Events’ (1970).
Donald Davidson (1917–2003) was an American philosopher whose work - from the 1960s onward — has been very influential in many areas of analytic philosophy. He has also had a smaller impact on various Continental philosophers.
This following essay basically expresses Davidson’s position of anomalous monism. This is a philosophical thesis about the mind–body relation. The theory has it that mental events are identical with physical events (hence the monism in anomalous monism). Yet it also argues that the mental is anomalous in that under the descriptions of mental events, relationships between them are not describable by strict physical laws. This means that Davidson proposed an identity theory of mind without the bridge laws that strongly tie mental events to physical (or brain) events (as in the type-identity theory).
Mental Events
Many people accept that the mind interacts with the brain. Or, more technically and to use Donald Davidson’s own words, “some mental events interact causally with physical events”. Davidson gives a very concrete example of this:
i) Mental Events: perceivings, notings, calculations, judgements, decisions, intentional actions, changes of belief.
ii) Physical Event: the sinking of the Bismarck.
The mental events in i) brought about physical event ii).
So if there are causal events between the mind and the body, then, Davidson argued, these causal events must instantiate the kind of physical laws found in every other part of the universe. To use Davidson’s words:
“[E]vents related as cause and effect fall under strict deterministic laws.”
Many people think that this is the case simply because it’s the case everywhere else in the universe.
The “third principle”, as Davidson calls it, is a position that’s not well-known outside the philosophy of mind. This is that
“there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained”.
That basically means that we can never really know, for certain, what a mind (or a person with a mind) will do next. If we kick a ball, we know what will happen: it will move in a particular direction. Though put a mind (or a person) in any given situation, then we can’t forecast precisely how he or she will act. (Of course we won’t know the exact trajectory of a kicked ball either.) We can, however, offer probabilistic forecasts of that mind’s behaviour; though this would be a forecast determined by past behaviours and verbal expressions rather than by the “inner” nature of the mind or the workings of the brain.
And because Davidson believed in what he called “the anomalism of the mental” (i.e., that there aren’t strict deterministic laws with which we can forecast, predict or explain mental events), then the Identity Theorist has a problem because he believes that the mental and the physical are identical. That means that there must be such laws for mental events.
Let’s be clear what the Identity Theorist believed. He believed that, for example, a particular pain is identical to a particular brain state. They’re literally numerically identical.
Anomalous monism (the position advanced by Davidson), on the other hand, is still physicalist; despite the special position it gives to mental events. The anomalous monist believes that all events are physical. Yet the anomalous monist also believes that “mental phenomena [can’t] be given purely physical explanations”.
So why aren’t mental events subsumable under scientific laws?
How does the monist account for this anomaly?
Firstly, although the mental and the physical aren’t identical, there is a very close relation between the two. Mental phenomena depend — or supervene — upon physical phenomena. And the supervenience thesis is both strong and, according to some, thoroughly physicalist.
Let’s explain this close relation between mental events and physical events.
If two events are alike in all physical respects, then they’ll be alike in all mental respects — despite the fact that they’re not identical! To put the same position somewhat differently. Two objects can’t alter in some mental respect without also altering in some physical respect.
Now a little will be said on the monist’s position on reductionism (which is very important in the philosophy of mind), vis-à-vis the relation between mind and matter.
Reductionism
As Davidson put it:
“Dependence or supervenience of this kind does not entail reducibility through law or definition.”
Anomalous monism isn’t a reductive physicalist position. This means that the mind can’t be reduced to the brain without remainder. Thus supervenience doesn’t entail psychophysical laws.
Again, Davidson went into the reasons why we can’t use physical predicates to describe or explain mental events. So, despite his physicalism, he argued that no physical predicate has the “same extension as a mental predicate”. To sum up: Davidson essentially argued that the physical and the mental are ontologically identical (again, hence the monism); though descriptively (or conceptually) non-identical.
Yet, at a prima facie level at least, this seems to be a hard position to defend. That is, can we make sense of ontological monism alongside conceptual dualism?
To defend his position Davidson discussed the long tradition of naturalist attempts to define the mental (or supposedly non-physical) in terms of the physical. (For example, behaviourists tried to define or describe the mind — or the mental — in terms of observable physical behaviour.) Davidson also argued that naturalism in ethics failed; as well as in instrumentalism and operationalism in the sciences; in the causal theory of meaning in semantics; and, finally, in phenomenalism in epistemology. According to Davidson, all these attempts at “definitional reductionism [were] conspicuously inadequate”. So it can now be said that Davidson was a realist about the mind or the mental (as well as about ethical terms/concepts and even properties). And, finally, Davidson believed that meaning is something that is not reducible to the physical.
Davidson then became slightly more technical and went into more detail about the anomalism of the mental.
The Technical Argument
Davidson cited the case of a mental event (m) and a physical event (p).
If m causes p, then “under some description m and p must instantiate a strict law”. However, this law must be physical because there are only physical laws. Yet “if m falls under a physical law, [then] it [must have] a physical description”. That is to say: m must be a physical event. This in turn means that in order for m to be subsumed under laws, it must be described in the language of p.
Davidson then argued something which , prima facie, seems contradictory. He wrote:
“So every mental event that is causally related to a physical event is a physical event.”
This appears to be saying that the mental is physical. Alternatively, that the mental is both mental and physical (hence the conceptual dualism). Yet hasn’t Davidson been arguing against the mental’s subsumption under the physical (hence the “anomalism of the mental”)?
To recap: In Baruch Spinoza’s fashion (in his own substance monism), Davidson claims that we can look at the mental qua mental and also the mental qua physical. m-descriptions can’t be reduced down to p-descriptions. And, therefore, p-descriptions can’t be lifted up to m-descriptions. However, if Davidson was a monist, m and p are the same substance. Therefore m = p. That said, it has already been stated that Davidson didn’t accept the Identity Theory. So one can now ask:
Can one be an ontological monist of mind and not be an identity theorist?
Human Freedom
It can be argued that there’s an idée fix running throughout all of Davidson’s paper.
It boils down to one thing: the necessity (or simple possibility) of human freedom.
The explanation — or perhaps the guaranteeing of — free will can be said to be one of Davidson’s primary aims in his paper. Yet despite the fact that earlier on Davidson had talked about “the efficacy of thought and purpose in the material world, and their freedom from law”, it’s strange that he was only explicit on this matter at the very end of his paper.
This is what Davidson wrote:
“The anomalism of the mental is thus a necessary condition for viewing action as autonomous.”
To put that another way:
The mind’s freedom from physical causation is necessary in order to secure us freedom (that is, secure us free will).
But which came first for Davidson?
Did the arguments about the anomalism of the mental lead to Davidson’s views about human freedom? Or did his pre-existing views about human freedom lead him to his arguments about the anomalism of the mental? Most analytic philosophers will say that whether or not this chicken or egg came first doesn’t matter at all. They’ll argue that if Davidson’s arguments work, then that’s all that matters.
In any case, the argument that Davidson’s faith in human freedom pre-dated his philosophical defences of human freedom becomes a little stronger when we bear in mind his references to Immanuel Kant — who, of course, undertook a similar enterprise.
In the last paragraph, Davidson paid homage to Kant by quoting — in full - a passage from Kant’s Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals. This is the passage from Kant which Davidson quotes:
“[W]e think of man in a different sense and relation when we call him free, and when we regard him as subject to the laws of nature… It must therefore show that not only can both of these very well coexist, but that both must be thought as necessarily united in the same subject.”
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