ANOMALOUS MONISM AND NATURALISM

“I acquiesce in what Davidson calls anomalous monism, also known as tokenphysicalism: there is no mental substance, but there are irreducibly mentalways of grouping physical states and events…Still the mentalistic predicates,for all their vagueness, have long interacted with one another, engenderingage-old strategies for predicting and explaining human action. Theycomplement natural science in their incommensurable way, and areindispensible both to the social sciences and to our every day dealings. ReadDennett and Davidson” (Quine: Pursuit of Truth 1990 pp72-73)

“The notion of an exhaustive class of states each of which qualifies as thinkingabout Fermat’s Last Theorem, and each of which is specifiable in purelyphysiological terms, seems discouragingly unrealistic even if restricted to asingle thinker. It is at this point that we must acquiesce in the psychophysicaldualism of predicates, though clinging to our effortless monism of substance. Itis what Davidson has called anomalous monism. Each occurrence of a mentalstate is still, we insist an occurrence of a physical state of a body, but thegroupings of these occurrences under mentalistic predicates are largelyuntranslatable into physiological terms. There is token identity, to give it thejargon, but type diversity…The general predicate ‘thinking about Fermat’s LastTheorem’, then, is irreducibly mentalistic. It still denotes various physicalobjects in its intermittent way (usually mathematicians), and it has its place inour meaningful physicalistic language. The point of anomalous monism is justthat mentalistic predicate imposes on bodily states and events a grouping thatcannot be defined in the special vocabulary of physiologically describable, wepresume, given all pertinent information. (Quine: From Stimulus to Science1995 pp87-88)

Chapter 6 of Quine’s classic ‘Word and Object’ (1960) book

contains a section called ‘The Double Standard’ where he

discusses Brentano’s claim that propositional attitude

ascriptions cannot be reduced to purely physical (extensional)

science. Quine as a naturalist obviously chose the course of

arguing that if propositional attitude ascriptions are not

reducible to extensional physics we must reject them from our

physics. However he recognised that descriptions of people’s

behaviour in terms of intentional locutions were indispensible

in ordinary life. Furthermore he recognised that despite the

irreducibility of intentional locutions they had real

explanatory value. Hence he grudgingly adopted what he called

the double standard where we have to adopt intentional

ascription language in ordinary life while eschewing it for

scientific purposes. As can be seen from the above quote he

even adopted a anomalous monism near the end of his

philosophical career.

In the fifty five years since ‘Word and Object’ philosophers

influenced by Quine have tried to deal with the propositional

attitudes in various different ways. The Churchland’s adopted

an approach which argued that future science would do away

with propositional attitude ascriptions altogether and all

human behaviour would be explained in the language of

neuroscience. Fodor defended the reality of propositional

attitude ascriptions. While Dennett argued that propositional

attitude ascriptions were real patterns which picked out

information which would be missed if we adopted a purely

physical level explanation, but that at base intentions were

not to be found at the ultimate physical level. Davidson’s

solution was to adopt anomalous monism; Quine as we can see

from the above quotes, believed that Davidson’s solution was

the correct one. In this blog I will argue that if one is a

naturalist like Quine then recent developments show that from

a naturalistic perspective (and there is no other legitimate

perspective) anomalous monism is false.

NATURALISM AND ANONOMALOUS MONISM

In their ‘Everything Must Go’ (2006) Ladyman et al criticise

both Davidson (and Fodor) who wrote that physics discovers

causal laws that take the form of exceptionless

generalizations relating atomic events (ETMG p.35). Ladyman et

al take exception to this claim as, according to them, if one

looks at actual physical laws one will see that these laws

have numerous counter examples and are the laws physicists

produce are functionally interdependent not generalisations

(ibid. p.35). They hold Davidson’s 1970 paper ‘Mental Events’

responsible for the fact that a substantial proportion of

contemporary philosophers think that biological, mental, and

economic properties supervene on physical properties (some of

these people think of supervenience as part/whole physicalism

which contradicts Primacy of Physics Constraint) (ibid p.55).

Both Davidson (1970) and Fodor (1974) were arguing against

Type Reductionism. Ladyman et al note that the title of

Fodor’s paper ‘Special Sciences or The Disunity of Science as

a Working Hypothesis’ indicates that he was attacking Putnam

and Oppenheim’s (1958) paper ‘Unity of Science as a Working

Hypothesis’. Ladyman et al note that Fodor argues against

bridge laws which played no role in Putnam and Oppenheim’s

original paper. They also criticize Fodor for not dealing with

the many examples which Putnam and Oppenheim use in their

paper; they chastise Fodor for dealing with toy models of

physics opposed to real physics. This approach has become more

and more common over the last forty years to the detriment of

metaphysics (ibid. p. 63).

Fodor’s two main arguments against the unity of science are

that the generalisations in physics usually contribute nothing

to generalisations in the special sciences. Ladyman et al

argue that Fodor massively overstates his case here. Fodor’s

second argument is his multiple realization argument. They

agree that the multiple realisation argument is a good

argument against type reductionism; but they do not think that

it supports non-reductive physicalism. Ladyman et al. argue

against supervenience as follows:

“Hence, unlike external relations, the non-supervenient relations into whichseveral quantum particles may enter are not even supervenient on therelational properties which there relata possess independently of each other.They are much more independent of the properties of the individual particlesthan spatio-temporal relations between classic objects. This would seem torefute supervenience in so far as the doctrine is supposed to be inspired byscience as Lewis claims…We have argued that entanglement as described byquantum mechanics teaches us that Humean supervenience is false, and thatall the properties of fundamental physics seem to be extrinsic to individualobjects” (ibid pp 163-164)

The above claim obviously has serious implications for

Davidson’s Anomalous Monism. They argue as follows:

“For now the key point is that commitment to a world of levels strictlycomposed out of deep down little things has played an essential role in leadingneo-scholastic metaphysicians to cast doubt on the ontological seriousness ofall the special sciences. This is very far reaching anti-naturalism” (ibid p. 206)

Here we can see that if philosophers take contemporary physics

seriously (as they must) then the idea that the mental

supervenes on the physical cannot stand, as the supervenience

relation itself is in question. In order to see how this claim

effects Davidson’s Anomalous Monism I will outline his

arguments for it and then show where those arguments fail.

ARGUMENTS FOR ANONALOUS MONISM

In his ‘Psychology as Philosophy’ when arguing that there can

be no psychophysical laws Davidson argues as follows:

(1) He notes the holistic character of the cognitive field:

“Any effort at increasing the accuracy and power of a theory of behaviourforces us to bring more and more of the whole system of the agent’s beliefs andmotives directly into account. But in inferring this system from the evidence, wenecessarily impose conditions of coherence, rationality, and consistency. Theseconditions have no echo in physical theory, which is why we can look for nomore than rough correlations between psychological and physicalphenomena.” (Davidson: Psychology as Philosophy p. 25)

(2) He also notes the constraints of Rationality in explaining

a person’s behaviour intentionally. He doubts that causal

explanations of the type (supposedly) used in physics can

capture the facts of rational decision like deciding between

conflicting reasons and picking the best course of action.

(3) Davidson argues that we have no serious laws of the kind:

Whenever a man has such and such beliefs and desires, and

such-and-such further conditions are satisfied, he will act in

such a way (ibid p.25). He argues that there are no serious

laws of this kind, rather all we have are mere statistical

generalisations. And he notes that the probabilistic laws in

physics are nothing like the statistical generalisations in

intentional explanation because physical laws give sharply

fixed probabilities which, which spring from the nature of the

theory. If we want to give an explanation of a person’s

behaviour in terms of beliefs and desires what we want are, he

argues, a quantitative calculus that brings all relevant

beliefs and desires into the picture. He believes that such

calculus is impossible. (It is worth noting that he tries to

construct such a calculus in his ‘Unified Theory of Thought

and Action’ with by his own admission mixed results)

(4) Davidson worked experimentally in the sixties on Decision

Theory as developed by Frank Ramsey (Truth and Probability

1926) for several years. He notes that this form of Decision

Theory (Basically Game Theory) is the best way to discover the

nature of beliefs and desires in terms of actions:

“Ramsey’s theory suggests an experimental procedure for disengaging theroles of subjective probability (or degree of belief) and subjective value inchoice of behaviour. Clearly, if it may be assumed that an agent judgesprobabilities in accord with frequencies or so-called objective probabilities, it iseasy to compute from his choices amongst values what his choices are; andsimilarly one can compute his degree of belief in various propositions if onecan assume that his values are, say linear money” (Ibid p. 26)

So Davidson assumes that to some degree we can construct a

scientific account of the propositional attitudes in terms of

Decision Theory. However he doesn’t think that this decision

theory is on a par scientifically with physical theories. This

is because he thinks that Ramsey’s theory has no predictive

power unless it is assumed that people’s beliefs and values do

not change over time. He noted that when studied

experimentally it can be seen that the testing procedure

effects the pattern we are trying to study. Merely making

choices (without reward or feedback) alters future choices.

The choices tend to become more and more consistent. This

result, he claims, shows that Ramsey’s model will not be

useful in making accurate predictions. All of this is

connected to the fact that for Davidson: Attributing a belief

a man cannot be done one at a time. We must attribute many

beliefs to a man at the same time. And of course a man’s

beliefs are connected to his desires, to his whole background

theory of the world. When we are trying to interpret others we

must assume that they hold a mostly true theory of the world

and that their beliefs are connected to each other in ways

that are largely consistent, and that theories are modified to

accommodate the consistency criterion. So, for example, if a

person becomes aware that he holds a contradictory set of

beliefs he will modify his beliefs to avoid this problem.

In his 1991 book ‘Donald Davidson’ Simon Evnine noted a

problem with construing this rationality constraint in terms

of physics (in this case neuroscience):

“Let us look in detail at a case where the absence of an echo in physical theoryof normative principles means that we cannot have a law linking some mentalpredicate with some physical predicate. If p is the proposition that there are atleast ten apples in my bag, and q is the proposition that there are at least 5apples in my bag, then, since p entails q, normative principles tell us that ifsomeone believes that p, he should not believe that not q. Now suppose thatthere were psychophysical laws which connected the belief p with neural statem, and the belief that not-q with neural state n. These bridge laws ought toenable us to infer, from the fact that if someone believes that p, then he shouldnot believe that not q, that if someone is in neural state m, he should not be in

neural state n, But how are to make sense of this ‘should’ in the context of aphysical law relating two distinct neural states?” (Evnine p. 19)

Evnine is surely correct that our brain states ALONE do not of

them tell us that we should or should not avoid

contradictions. However one can be pretty sure that evolution

built our brains in such a way as to respect things like the

law of non-contradiction respecting it would be vital to our

survival . As Quine correctly noted creatures invariably wrong

in their inductions have the pathetic but praiseworthy

characteristic of dying before reproducing their own kind.

Things are even worse for creatures who are incapable of

reasoning deductively.

Davidson builds his argument for Anomalous Monism on three

premises:

(1) Mental Events are causally related to Physical Events.

(2) Singular Causal relations are backed by Strict Laws.

(3) There are no strict psychophysical laws.

The above set of premises seem on the face of it to be

inconsistent because if mental events are causally related to

physical events, and singular causal relations are indeed

backed by strict laws then it would seem that contra premise 3

we can indeed have strict psychophysical laws. Davidson argues

that contrary to appearances the above premises are consistent

and he tried to show why this is the case in his 1970 paper

Mental Events. As an example of a mental event being causally

related to a physical event he notes:

“If someone sunk the Bismarck, then various mental events such as perceivings,notings, calculations, judgements, decisions, intentional actions, and changesof belief played a causal role in the sinking of the Bismarck. I would urge thatthe fact that someone sank the Bismarck entails that he moved his body inways that was caused by mental events of certain sorts, and his bodilymovement in turn caused the Bismarck to sink ” (Davidson: Mental Events p.208)

So we can see from the above that Davidson is talking about

mental events he is referring to intentional actions as

opposed to conscious states. So Davidson’s first premise

amounts to the claim that intentional actions causally

interact with non-intentional events. He holds that the causal

interaction can go the other way. So, for example, a ship

driving towards us can cause us to perceive a ship. In this

sense Davidson argues that physical events can cause mental

events and vice versa. Given this case one could be forgiven

for wondering why he denies that there can be psychophysical

laws?

Firstly he argues that mental events are identical to physical

events: by an event, he means an unrepeatable, dated

individual e.g. The event of the twin towers being bombed (see

Stephen Pinker ‘The Stuff of Thought’ for difficulties in

individuating events). His Anomalous Monism is the position

that the mental supervenes on the physical; so mental events

depend of physical events, it entails that two events cannot

be alike in all physical respects but differ in mental

respects, and that an object cannot alter in some mental

respect without altering in some physical respect (ibid p.

214). However Davidson argues that despite the proceeding

facts this does not mean that we can reduce the psychological

to the physical anymore than we can reduce moral properties to

descriptive properties. The obvious claim being that morality

is prescriptive (normative) and we cannot derive an ought from

an is, while intentional descriptions are also irreducibly

normative. When we judge that a creature is an intentional

system we are attributing a minimal level of rationality to

them. We are saying that they can judge that something is the

case.

There are real weak points to all of Davidson’s premises

however I think that premise 3 is the weakest. He argued that

there are no psychophysical laws. There is a degree of truth

to the claim but this is because when Davidson talks about the

psychological he is talking about our standard folk-

psychology. Now our folk-psychology like our folk-physics and

our folk-biology is the result of our idiosyncratic

evolutionary history and our shared cultural heritage. This

folk-psychology, folk-physics etc is pragmatically useful but

it is also riddled with inconsistencies and is totally ill-

equipped to be translated into the language of scientific

laws. But as Chomsky correctly argues this doesn’t make the

mental anomalous anymore than it makes the physical anomalous,

rather it just shows the folly in trying to reduce

idiosyncratic folk theories to scientific theories:

“The argument does not seem entirely compelling. For the same reason weshould also not compare truisms about balls rolling down hills or a stormbrewing in the West with the law of falling bodies, but we are not concernedwith the lack of “physico-physical laws” connecting ordinary discourse aboutevents in the world and explanatory theories of nature…In so far as scientificinquiry might undermine one’s conviction that the Sun is setting or that objectsare impenetrable, it seems that it might in principle have similar effects onone’s convictions about the nature of beliefs…Folk Mechanics seems no more

susceptible than folk psychology to the formulation of bridge laws.” (Chomsky‘New Horizons in The Study of Language and Mind p. 89)

If Davidson wants us to take his third premise seriously he

needs to present us with further arguments which shows why we

should take a lack of psycho-physical laws any more seriously

than a lack of physico-physical laws.

Another objection to Davidson’s premise 3 is that his version

of a law relies heavily on a conception of causation that is

seriously at odds with anything to be found in science.

Davidson gives the following examples of one event causing

another:

(1)The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. caused the destruction

of Pompeii.

(2)His lighting the match caused the explosion.

(3)The next California earthquake will cause the destruction

of the Golden Gate Bridge.

(4)The hurricane is causing the rise in the water level.

Davidson argues that singular causal statements like the above

ones indicate the existence of laws that cover the cases. He

then goes on to claim that any justification for the claim

that singular causal events are covered by laws will be a-

priori. In his explication he notes that singular causal

statements are extensional in that their truth value is to

remain invariant independent of substitution of co-referring

names. So, for example, if (5) ‘Batman caused the Joker to

Cry’ is true then (6) ‘Bruce Wayne caused the Joker to Cry’

must be true as well because ‘Batman’ and ‘Bruce Wayne’ refer

to the same person. While by a law he means a true universally

quantified statement. Strict laws do not admit of ceteris

paribus clauses; though less strict laws from the sciences

like biology, psychology, etc will have these ceteris paribus

clauses.

We have seen already that Davidson argues for his anomalous

monism by claiming that intentional statements which are

irreducibly normative cannot be reduced to physical statements

which form a closed system. So he argues that while mental

states supervene on physical states they cannot be reduced to

them. (This seems to be connected to the fact that laws in

physics are unexceptionable and support counterfactuals

whereas laws in the special sciences employ ceteris paribus

clauses).

Some people have criticised Davidson by arguing that his

premise that true singular causal statements are covered by

laws is shown to be false by contemporary quantum physics; in

particular the fact that it is not deterministic. Davidson

however denies this charge. He argues that the laws that he

says exist are perfectly compatible with probabilistic laws.

This is because such laws are universal and exceptionless (the

probabilities they predict have no exceptions) (Davidson: Laws

and Cause p. 205). Davidson makes the following point:

“Since it allows probabilistic laws, the cause-law thesis does not (in one fairlystandard sense of that messy concept) imply determinism. Neither, then, does itimply complete predictability, even in principle, nor retrodictability.” (ibidp.205)

So we can see that Davidson at least does not see his Law-

Cause thesis as being in conflict with quantum mechanics.

CAUSATION AND PHYSICS

As we saw above Ladyman et al. are very critical of Davidson’s

views as expressed in his paper ‘Mental Events’ (1970) where

Davidson argues for his Anomalous Monism. In order to

understand their critique I will briefly describe the nature

of their scientistic project. In their (2006) book ‘Everything

Must Go’ they critiqued analytic metaphysics which relies

heavily on our intuitions to construct our metaphysical theory

of the world. A lot of their criticisms were directed to

philosophers who claim to be naturalistic but who build their

metaphysics upon toy models which while intuitively plausible

do not correspond with the world revealed by quantum

mechanics. This reliance on intuitions they think is a bad

thing because our intuitions are not designed to handle really

abstract thought about things like quantum mechanics:

“Furthermore, as science progresses we adjust our ontology in accordance withour concern for ontological parsimony. However, practical folk have nosystematic reason to be interested in the constraint. Nor could natural selectionattend to it when it designed the native anticipatory apparatus used bypractical folk. In coping with problems of scarcity, tracking the trajectoriesthrough local space and time of bundles of rewards is almost everything.Attention to wider informational dynamics in which processes are embeddedtypically delivers few if any additional payoffs, and may get in the way of payoff maximization because of computational costs. Therefore modelling causalrelations as sequences collisions of objects in time is a sensible heuristic.”(Ladyman and Ross ‘Everything Must Go’ p. 280)”

They are defending Ontic Structural Realism (OSR) which tries

to make sense of two conflicting arguments which pull us in

different directions about whether we should be realists or

anti-realists about science.

(1)The Pessimistic Meta Induction: argues that since science

goes through various different revolutions which disregard

entities which previous theories were committed to the

existence of (e.g. Ether) which supposedly shows that

theoretical terms are not actually picking out anything.

Arguing inductively people claim that since many revolutions

have occurred in the past and unless we assume (implausibly)

that our current physics is complete then more revolutions

will take place in the future. This shows that we are not

justified in believing that our theoretical entities refer to

anything. We should rather treat science as an instrumental

mode of making accurate predictions: Feynman “Shut Up and

Calculate”.

(2) The No Miracles Argument: If our theoretical terms do not

pick out mind independent entities then this makes the success

of science a miracle. Since there are no miracles in nature

then anti-realism must be false. Therefore one should become a

realist.

These two arguments seem to pull in different directions so

OSR tries to solve the problem by saying that it is structure

that is preserved across revolutions. A lot of direct

reference theories in semantics e.g. Putnam (1975) and Kripke

were designed to show how theoretical terms could refer across

revolutions. One of the advantages of the direct reference

theories is that they could explain reference to theoretical

entities within our scientific theories in ways which are more

plausible than the descriptivist approach favoured by Frege,

Russell and Wittgenstein. Ross and Ladyman seem to think that

their OSR can explain theory change in ways that don’t rely on

our intuitions in the same way illicit way that Kripke etc do.

In chapter 5 of ETMG ‘Causation in a Structural World’

Ladyman, Ross, and Spurret argue that at the level of

fundamental physics we should be eliminativists about

causation. This argument is accepted would have serious

consequences for Davidson’s theory of Anomalous Monism in

particular his first two premises which rely heavily on the

notion of causation.

Ladyman et al. argue that one of the typical explanations of

causation in philosophy is done in terms of micro banging of

sub-atomic particles. However since fundamental physics does

not justify us in postulating micro banging they claim that we

are justified in rejecting explanations which use the

unscientific notion of causation. By this they mean that in

terms of our most basic ontology which is given to us by

contemporary physics causation does not exist. However this

fact doesn’t mean that causation cannot play a role in the

explanations of the special sciences. They argue that

causation in terms of the basic sciences should be thought of

as follows:

“It is a concept that structures the notational worlds of observers who mustbook-keep real patterns from the perspectives that involve temporal and otherasymmetries they cannot ignore on pain of discarding information” (ETMG p.271)

So from the perspective of their scientism when it comes to

the special sciences the concept of causation is pragmatically

useful in helping us pick out real patterns in our

environment. However at the most fundamental level of reality

causation does not exist, rather it is what they call a

representational real pattern.

They note that there are two main conceptions of causation one

the folk psychological notion and two the scientific

conception of causation (and possibly a third notion:

causation as explicated by philosophers). We need to be

careful when talking about causation to note which version of

causation we are eliminating from our fundamental ontology

(all versions) and which version we are preserving as a

representational real pattern (the scientific conception). One

of the primary conceptions of causation is the idea of it as a

kind of cosmic glue that holds events together.

They follow Russell’s views on causation as expressed in his

1913 paper in the sense that they agree that causation finds

no role in fundamental physics. However, Russell argued that

because causation has no place in fundamental physics it

should be eliminated from our ontology altogether. While as we

saw above Ladyman et al argue that causation is a real pattern

that helps us construct our theories in the special sciences

even though it does not play any role in our fundamental

physics. So they, unlike Russell, do not recommend out right

elimination of causation.

As we noted above, we need to be careful when trying to

analyse the notion of causation, and whether it is the folk

psychological concept we are talking about, or the

philosopher’s conception of causation. We know from studies in

developmental psychology that as a matter of empirical fact

during the normal course of development children do not pick

out causal sequences in the same way as Hume believed. People

do not need to for two events to be constantly conjoined to

believe them to be causally connected. The work of Spelke

shows that children from about 4 months have expectations

about causation which include the singular causation. Ducasse

has shown that students perceive causal patterns based on a

single event. Obviously though our pre-theoretic intuitions of

causation don’t necessarily tell us about the nature of mind

independent reality rather they only tell us about how things

seem to us. In fact our intuitions about causality vary

depending on the culture we are born into (Cosmides 1989).

This fact places serious doubt about whether our intuitions of

causation are in any way accurate. From all of this they

conclude that our human folk psychology of causation is not

Humean, and it is too varied and idiosyncratic to be used as

our scientific conception of causality in the special

sciences. They follow Patrick Hayes in picking out three core

features of folk knowledge (1) It construes causal relations

as centred on some agent of change, (2) It postulates various

transformative principles (often conceived of as forces)

proceeding out from an agent to the recipient of causal

influence. (3) It incorporates assumptions about time

asymmetry: causal influences flow from the past into the

future. (ETMG p. 282)

CAUSES IN SCIENCE

They begin by criticising Russell who argued that the notion

of cause is never used by scientists. They did a corpus

analysis of the journal SCIENCE over an 8 year period and

found that the term ‘cause’ was used 90 times a month, while

the term ‘effect’ was used even more. They argue that

causation as used by scientists is not Humean causation of the

simple regularities kind it is actually closer to the folk

conception of causation. This they note leaves them with a

problem:

“We have now argued our way into a tight corner. Getting out requires us toseek an account that (i) leaves scientists free to talk about causal processeswithout risk of embarrassment in the company of metaphysicians, but (ii)follows Russell in denying intuitions (folk or Humean) about causation any rolein informing the metaphysical foundations of physics, or science moregenerally.” (ibid p.289)

Ultimately they reconcile the above seeming contradiction by

arguing as follows:

“So causation, as it figures in science, is a notional-world construct. However,as we argued in 4.5, this notional world provides a useful heuristic for locatingsome real patterns. It is because special sciences are concerned with relativelyisolatable regions of the universe which involve cross-classification from theperspective of less-than-fundamental but nevertheless limiting domains forthem, that the causal relationships on which they variously focus will appeal todifferent aspects of their information-carrying potential”

“We think that Earman and Roberts are correct in their claim that fundamentalphysics discovers something of a kind that special sciences don’t; and we callthis kind of something a universal real pattern. We argued in the precedingsections of this chapter for Russell’s and Redhead’s thesis that these realpatterns are not causal. They are instead structural, in the sense articulated inChapters 2 and 3.” (ibid p.290)

So given their argument and convincing demonstration that

causation plays very little role in physics, one could argue,

that they have cast doubt on Davidson’s first two premises in

his argument for Anomalous Monism.

ANOMALOUS MONISM AND THE PRIMACY OF PHYSICS CONSTRAINT

(1)Mental Events are causally related to Physical Events.

(2)Singular Causal relations are backed by Strict Laws.

(3)There are no strict psychophysical laws.

It is important to go through Davidson’s argument in light of

Ladyman et al. criticism of the scientific standing of

Causation. When Davidson is talking about causal relations

between events he is typically referring to macro level events

as opposed to events at a microphysical level. Below are some

examples of mental events he discusses in his paper ‘Mental

Events’:

(1)The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. caused the destruction

of Pompeii.

(2)His lighting the match caused the explosion.

(3)The next California earthquake will cause the destruction

of the Golden Gate Bridge.

(4)The hurricane is causing the rise in the water level.

As can be seen none of the examples are events at the level of

fundamental physics. Likewise when he speaks of mental events

being causally related to physical events and vice-versa he

does not use examples from fundamental physics. So, for

example, he talks of how mental events like perceiving,

believing, planning can cause physical events like the sinking

of a ship. None of these examples are anything that Ladyman et

al would have a problem with. They would cash out Davidson’s

examples of causation as pragmatic constructs which help us

navigate the world but which do not obtain at the fundamental

level. From the point of view of OSR there should be no

problem with premise 1 and saying that mental events like

perceiving, intending etc are causally related to physical

events like a ship sinking. Premise 2 that singular causal

relations are backed by strict laws. Premise 2 amounts to

nothing more than a guess. As we have seen above Davidson

argues that these causal laws will be extensional, he

distinguishes between description of causal laws and the laws

themselves. However he has not demonstrated the existence of

these causal laws and we have good reasons to think that

causation does not obtain at the level of fundamental physics.

At the macro-level scientists do indeed appeal to causal laws.

However they justify these appeals internal to a theory. As

Dennett argues that the intentional stance is justified as

follows:

“a pattern exists in some data-is real-if there is a

description of the data that is more efficient than the bit

map, whether or not anyone can concoct it’ (1991a, 34). Thus

there are (presumably) real patterns in lifeless parts of the

universe that no actual observer will ever reach, and further

real patterns whose data points are before our eyes right now,

but which no computer we can instantiate or design will ever

marshal the energy to compact.” (Quote taken from Ladyman and

Ross)

Now in the case of intentional stance ascription as used by

cognitive scientists we have good reasons to think that this

requirement is met but we have no real reason to think that it

is met at the level of ordinary folk-psychology ascriptions.

Davidson never really deals with scientific/computational

theories of psychology, all of his descriptions are from folk

psychology and there is no good evidence that the

generalisations of ordinary folk psychology have strict causal

laws. So Davidson gets his third premise for free, however it

follows trivially from the fact that there is no science of

folk-psychology anymore than there is a science of folk-

physics (obviously ethno-scientists study the type of folk

beliefs that people hold) but we don’t expect folk-physics to

be compatible with scientific physics and the same is true of

folk psychology. So Davidson’s argument for Anomalous Monism

doesn’t really succeed in any meaningful way.