PHIL 5973: Mental Causation Seminar
University of Arkansas, Fall 2003
Topic: Davidson’s Anomalous Monism and Kim’s Critique of Non-Reductive
Physicalism
Background: Davidson’s views on causation.
*The causal relata are particular, concrete events.
Davidsonian events (D-events): The contents of a region of space-time. As
concreta, D-events do not exhibit a property-structure corresponding to the various
ways they can be described. We can unambiguously refer to a D-event by marking
off its spatial-temporal boundaries. As such, there can be no coincident D-events,
and D-events include all the features of a region.
[Davidson’s view of events is further developed in his papers “The Individuation of
Events,” “Events as Particulars,” and “Eternal vs. Ephemeral Events,” all in his
Essays on Actions and Events.]
*Davidson is a Humean about causal relations, holding that whenever D-event a
causes D-event b: a falls under some predicate/description j and b falls under some
predicate/description k, and there is a strict law relating j-type events to k-type
events.
[Davidson discusses this more in his “Causal Relations,” again in Essays on Actions and
Events.]
“Mental Events”
An “apparent contradiction” that arises from 3 plausible principles:
1. The Principle of Causal Interaction: At least some mental events causally interact with
physical events.
2. The Nomological Character of Causality: Events related as cause and effect fall
under strict deterministic laws.
3. The Anomalism of the Mental: There are no strict deterministic laws with which
mental events can be predicted/explained.
*Davidson reconciles these principles by arguing that mental events are identical to physical
events.
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*The novelty of Davidson’s Identity Theory is that it is based, in part, on the absence of
psychophysical laws. The Identity Theorists before him generally thought that such laws
were required to establish an identity.
I.
Q: What is a mental event, or a physical event?
--A mental event simply is an event that can be truthfully, and non-trivially, described
by a sentence containing a mental predicate. (More generally, an X event is an event
that can be truthfully, and non-trivially, described by a sentence containing an X
predicate.) (p. 211)
--Intentionality is taken as the “mark of the mental” (Brentano’s Thesis).
*Distinguish token identity theories from type identity theories. Psychophysical laws are
required to establish the latter, but not the former. Laws, after all, relate kinds. (pp. 212-213)
--So, we can separate two distinctions that cross-cut each other (offering a four-fold
classification):
Are there psychophysical laws?
Are mental events identical to physical events?
The four possibilities that result are: 1) nomological monism, 2) nomological
dualism, 3) anomalous monism, and 4) anomalous dualism. (pp. 213-214)
--Anomalous Monism (AM) is an ontological physicalism, coupled with theoretical
pluralism (or at least dualism). It is a paradigmatic example of non-reductive physicalism.
--AM is consistent with the supervenience of the mental on the physical.
*Carefully read, and re-read (and ...), the last paragraph of section I. (p. 215).
II.
*What licenses Davidson’s a priori claim that there are no psychophysical laws? Why is he so
confident that discovering such laws is not an empirical possibility?
--Clue: “Beliefs and desires issue in behaviour only as modified and mediated by
further beliefs and desires, attitudes and attendings, without limit. Clearly this holism
of the mental realm is a clue both to the autonomy and to the anomalous character
of the mental.” (p. 217)
--Mental and physical predicates are not “made for” each other (as ‘grue’ and
‘emerald’ are not “made for” each other).
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--homonomic generalizations: generalizations that we expect can be
improved and turned into a law by adding conditions stated in the original
vocabulary.
--heteronomic generalizations: generalizations that we expect can be
improved and turned into a law only by adding conditions stated in an
alternative vocabulary. (p. 219)
--Belief and desire attribution is holistic and governed by the norm of
rationality:
“There is no assigning beliefs to a person one by one on the basis of his
verbal behaviour, his choices, or other local signs no matter how plain and
evident, for we make sense of particular beliefs only as they cohere with
other beliefs, with preferences, with intentions, hopes, fears, expectations,
and the rest.” (p. 221) [Compare the last paragraph on p. 221 to what we
found in Dennett’s views on rationality constraints on intentional systems.]
--The norm of rationality governing intentionality explains the heteronomic
character of psychophysical generalizations:
“The heteronomic character of general statements linking the mental and the
physical traces back to this central role of translation in the description of all
propositional attitudes, and to the indeterminacy of translation. [footnote to
Quine] There are no strict psychophysical laws because of the disparate
commitments of the mental and physical schemes. It is a feature of physical
reality that physical change can be explained by laws that connect it with
other changes and conditions physically described. It is a feature of the
mental that the attribution of mental phenomena must be responsible to the
background of reasons, beliefs, and intentions of the individual. There
cannot be tight connections between the realms if each is to retain allegiance
to its proper source of evidence.” (p. 222)
III.
*Physical laws are homonomic:
“Physical theory promises to provide a comprehensive closed system guaranteed to yield a
standardized, unique description of every physical event couched in a vocabulary amenable
to law.” (pp. 223-224)
--The only laws that back causal relations are physical laws.
*Mental laws are heteronomic—the mental is not a “closed system”. There are no strict
mentalistic laws of any kind (i.e., mental-mental, physical-mental or mental-physical).
*A summary of the argument appears on p. 224, beginning with “The demonstration of
identity …”
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*The distinction between token and type identities: “Mental events as a class cannot be
explained by physical science; particular mental events can when we know particular
identities.” (p. 225)
“Psychology as Philosophy”
Action (behavior) = (def.) an event that can be (truthfully) described in a way that makes it
intentional. (p. 329)
--So, obviously, intentional idioms are central to action (behavior).
*Davidson’s goal in this essay is to establish that there are no deterministic laws of behavior
(e.g., the Anomalism of the Mental). For this reason, psychology (insofar as it is concerned
with propositional attitudes) is not a science (but philosophy!).
--“What lies behind our inability to discover deterministic psychophysical laws is this.
When we attribute a belief, a desire, a goal, an intention or a meaning to an agent, we
necessarily operate within a system of concepts in part determined by the structure
of beliefs and desires of the agent himself. Short of changing the subject, we cannot
escape this feature of the psychological; but this feature has no counterpart in the
world of physics.” (p. 230)
--Davidson is arguing for the strong claim that the generalizations of the social
sciences, in principle, cannot be improved and turned into deterministic laws.
--It does not follow from any of this that our actions are not determined. They are
simply not determined relative to the descriptions of psychological theory.
*Davidson’s argument for the Anomalism of the Mental rests on the holism of the mental.
*Someone can have reasons for doing some action and perform that action, but not for
those reasons (i.e., those reasons did not cause the action or did not cause the action in the
right way). (p. 232)
*There is an essentially ex post facto quality to psychological generalizations. There are certain
conditions in which these psychological generalizations fail, but there is no way of
determining before the action occurs whether such conditions obtain. (p. 233) (Recall B.F.
Skinner’s critique of intentional systems theory, as discussed in Dennett.)
[We’ll ignore his paragraphs on Ramsey’s decision theory.]
*Q: Is intransitivity in one’s preferences just as unacceptable as intransitivity of the physical
predicate ‘heavier than’? (p. 237)
*Attributing beliefs is dependent on, and every bit as difficult as, interpreting speech.
Indeed, Davidson claims they are an intertwined package. (pp. 237-238)
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--When interpreting a language we should work under the assumption that the
language-speaker has mostly true beliefs.
“But we cannot make sense of error until we have established a base of agreement.”
(p. 239)
Kim’s “The Non-Reductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation”
1.
*Cartesian interactionism denies the possibility of a causally closed physical (or mental)
theory.
Physical Closure: The complete causal explanation of any physical effect will need to
cite only other physical conditions and laws.
*Contemporary philosophy of mind rejects the substance dualism of Descartes, but admits
different “levels” of entities and properties. Higher level entities have lower level entities as
parts (e.g., higher level entities are composed of lower level entities), but what is the
relationship between the properties of various levels? Is property reduction the analogue of
entity composition?
3 options for higher level properties: reductionism, eliminativism, and nonreductionism
Non-reductive physicalism: “It consists of the two characteristic theses of nonreductivism: its ontology is physical monism, the thesis that physical entities and
their mereological aggregates are all that there is, but its ‘ideology’ is anti-reductionist
and dualist, consisting in the claim that psychological properties are irreducibly
distinct from the underlying physical and biological properties.” (p. 192)
*Kim will argue that non-reductive physicalism, like Cartesian interactionism, violates the
causal closure of the physical.
2.
*The primacy of the physical: i) all mental properties are instantiated in physical particulars
and ii) all mental events are physical events, but not all physical events are mental events.
*Q: What notion best captures the relationship mental properties bear to physical
properties?
--Supervenience? Physical Realization?
--Kim prefers to speak of realization—in part, because of the influence of the
multiple realizability argument for non-reductive physicalism, but also because of the
many varieties of supervenience.
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--For Kim, a “realizer” of some property specifies the micro-structural basis
or causal mechanism of that property. (p. 197)
3.
*Note Kim’s 4 theses of non-reductive physicalism (p. 198). Guilt by association?—these
theses would also be shared by the classical Emergentists. (Classical Emergentists typically
thought that the connection between realizer and higher level property was more mysterious,
however (e.g., how the higher level property is realized could not be explained).)
4.
*Kim accepts ‘Alexander’s dictum’: “to be real is to have causal powers.” (p. 202)
Downward causation: “novel” causal influence of a higher level on a lower level.
5.
*Kim’s argument that non-reductive physicalists (NRPs) are committed to downward
causation (pp. 203-204):
1) NRPs accept mental properties as irreducible, new additions to the world.
2) By Alexander’s dictum, mental properties must then contribute new causal
powers (e.g., something other than the causal powers of the lower level
mechanisms that realize them).
3) But, even if mental properties “merely” cause other mental properties, they must
still cause the realization bases of these other mental properties. (This is The
Causal Realization Principle.) But causing the base properties (lower level
mechanisms) is downward causation.
6.
*On p. 207, Kim takes epiphenomenalism seriously. If every effect is physical and physics is
causally closed, simplicity suggests that there are only physical causes. (More positively,
there is a causal exclusion worry—we’ll introduce this in a couple weeks.)
*Kim offers The Principle of Causal Inheritance, on p. 208. Kim states that NRPs must reject
this principle, because it reduces (i.e., identifies) mental properties (e.g., their causal powers)
to their realizers.
*NRPs, because they are committed to downward causation, are also committed to
violations of Physical Closure. To return to the theme of section 1., this is as bad as
Cartesian interactionism.
*Kim suggests that we should look for a reductionistic solution.
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