Anomalous monism: are mental events identical to physical events but irreducible as mental, and does this position escape epiphenomenalism?

Donald Davidson, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Three principles jointly entail anomalous monism. First, there is causal interaction between mental and physical events.¹ Second, causal relations between events fall under strict deterministic laws. Third, there are no strict psychophysical laws. From these three principles it follows that mental events are identical to physical events: only if the mental event that is the cause falls under a physical description does the second principle hold, and since there are no strict psychophysical laws, the physical description under which it falls is a purely physical one.²³

Mental and physical event-types are not identical; mental event-types supervene on physical event-types without being reducible to them. The causal relata are events as particulars, not property- instances; causal efficacy attaches to events, not to their descriptions.

Sources

1. ANOMALOUS MONISM Thinking Causes In 1970 I proposed a theory about the relation between the mental physical called Anomalous Monism (AM). holds mental entities (particular space-bound objects and events) are physical entities, but that mental concepts are not reducible by definition or natural law to physical concepts.

   Truth, Language, and History, pp. 183–185

2. Suppose m, a mental event, caused p, a physical event; then, under some description m and p instantiate a strict law. This law can only be physical, according to the previous paragraph. But if m falls under a physical law, it has a physical description; which is to say it is a physical event. An analogous argument works when a physical event causes a mental event.

   Philosophy of Psychology, p. 184

3. But such epistemological and explanatory issues, however we resolve them, ought not lead us to color singular causal statements intensional. In formulating the cause-law thesis, what should we count as a law? universally quantified statements. must be lawlike: they must support counterfactuals, and > Laws and Cause confirmed by their instances (these conditions are not independent).

   Truth, Language, and History, pp. 203–204

Where the argument is made

• 'Mental Events' (1970, in Essays on Actions and Events, OUP 2001) — statement of the three principles and the token-identity argument
• 'Psychology as Philosophy' (1974, in Essays) — irreducibility of the mental
• 'Thinking Causes' (1993, in Heil and Mele eds., Mental Causation, OUP) — the late response to Kim

How the argument was received

Kim's causal exclusion argument — that nonreductive physicalism leaves mental properties causally inert because the physical suffices for every effect the mental is said to produce — requires that properties or property-instances, not events, are the causal relata. That is the premise to refuse. The argument for anomalous monism holds event-causation as basic: the causal relation holds between events as particulars, and those events fall under physical descriptions that participate in strict laws without the mental descriptions under which they also fall being thereby causally irrelevant. Mental descriptions do explanatory work that physical descriptions cannot do — they rationalize, they attribute reasons — and this explanatory irreducibility is not epiphenomenal because the explanatory work is different in kind, not absent.