Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 75 of 138
Davidson's anomalous monism
Anomalous monism is a view put forward by Donald Davidson20 for which he advances the following argument: Step 1: There are causal relations between mental phenomena and physical phenomena. Step 2: Wherever there are events related as cause and effect they must fall under strict, deterministic causal laws. Step 3: But there are no such strict deterministic causal laws relating the mental and the physical. In Davidson’s terms, there are no psycho-physical laws. Therefore, Step 4: Conclusion. All so-called mental events are physical events. They have to be physical events to instantiate physical laws, and when we describe them as mental, we are just picking out a category of physical events that satisfy a certain mental vocabulary. They are mental under one description, but the same events are also physical under another description. The result, then, is a kind of materialism, a materialism that says that the subject matter of the psychological sciences will never be describable by the kinds of universal laws that we get in physics, not because they are a mysterious kind of spiritual or mental entity, but rather because the descriptions we use to pick them out, the mental descriptions, do not relate in a lawlike fashion to physical phenomena picked out under physical descriptions. The only argument that Davidson gives for this point is that mental phenomena, like beliefs and desires, are subject to constraints of rationality, and rationality has “no echo in physics.”