{"agent_id":"davidson","agent_name":"Donald Davidson","slug":"anomalous-monism","label":"Anomalous monism: are mental events identical to physical events but irreducible as mental, and does this position escape epiphenomenalism?","topic":"Anomalous monism","question":"Are mental events identical to physical events but irreducible as mental, and does this position escape epiphenomenalism?","position":"Three principles jointly entail anomalous monism. First, there is causal interaction between mental and physical events. 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. 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.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Three principles jointly entail anomalous monism.","n":[]},{"t":"First, there is causal interaction between mental and physical events.","n":[1]},{"t":"Second, causal relations between events fall under strict deterministic laws.","n":[]},{"t":"Third, there are no strict psychophysical laws.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[2,3]}],[{"t":"Mental and physical event-types are not identical; mental event-types supervene on physical event-types without being reducible to them.","n":[]},{"t":"The causal relata are events as particulars, not property- instances; causal efficacy attaches to events, not to their descriptions.","n":[]}]],"texts":"'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. Reception: Jaegwon Kim's 'The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism' (1989 APA Presidential Address) and Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge 1993) — the causal exclusion argument; Ernest Lepore and Barry Loewer's 'Mind Matters' (Journal of Philosophy 1987) — formal reconstruction of the anomalous monism argument; Brian McLaughlin's 'Type Epiphenomenalism, Type Dualism, and the Causal Priority of the Physical' (Philosophical Perspectives 1989); Ned Block's 'Can the Mind Change the World?' (1990).","works":["'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"],"reception":"Jaegwon Kim's 'The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism' (1989 APA Presidential Address) and Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge 1993) — the causal exclusion argument; Ernest Lepore and Barry Loewer's 'Mind Matters' (Journal of Philosophy 1987) — formal reconstruction of the anomalous monism argument; Brian McLaughlin's 'Type Epiphenomenalism, Type Dualism, and the Causal Priority of the Physical' (Philosophical Perspectives 1989); Ned Block's 'Can the Mind Change the World?' (1990).","status":"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.","era":"1917-2003","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Truth, Language, and History","page":"pp. 183–185","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Truth, Language, and History, pp. 183–185"},{"n":2,"work":"Philosophy of Psychology","page":"p. 184","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Philosophy of Psychology, p. 184"},{"n":3,"work":"Truth, Language, and History","page":"pp. 203–204","canonical":"","quote":"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).","label":"Truth, Language, and History, pp. 203–204"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"reasons-and-causes","label":"Reasons and causes: does the reason for which an agent acts explain the action in the same sense that causes explain their effects?"},{"slug":"truth-theoretic-semantics","label":"Truth-theoretic semantics: can a Tarski-style recursive truth theory serve as the vehicle for a compositional meaning theory for natural languages?"},{"slug":"the-principle-of-charity","label":"The Principle of Charity: is the requirement to attribute largely true beliefs a constitutive condition on interpretation or a distorting methodological prejudice that forces agreement?"},{"slug":"conceptual-schemes-and-the-third-dogma-of-empiricism","label":"Conceptual schemes and the third dogma of empiricism: is the concept of a radically different conceptual scheme intelligible, or does it dissolve under examination?"},{"slug":"indeterminacy-of-interpretation-and-inscrutability-of-refere","label":"Indeterminacy of interpretation and inscrutability of reference: does the absence of a unique correct interpretation collapse into nihilism about meaning?"}]}