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.

*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).

        --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 …”

*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)

    --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 non-reductionism

    Non-reductive physicalism:  “It consists of the two characteristic theses of non-reductivism:  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.

        --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.