Anomalous monism: Oscillating between dogmas

Synthese 148 (1):79-97 (2006)
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Abstract

Davidson’s anomalous monism, his argument for the identity between mental and physical event tokens, has been frequently attacked, usually demanding a higher degree of physicalist commitment. My objection runs in the opposite direction: the identities inferred by Davidson from mental causation, the nomological character of causality and the anomaly of the mental are philosophically problematic and, more dramatically, incompatible with his famous argument against the third dogma of empiricism, the separation of content from conceptual scheme. Given the anomaly of the mental and the absence of psychophysical laws, there are no conceptual resources to relate mental and physical predicates. We fall in the third dogma if we claim that the very same token event is mental and physical. One of the premises must be rejected: I will claim that we do not need a law to subsume cause and effect to be entitled to speak of causation. Davidson has never offered an argument to back this premise. Against such a dogma I will sketch some ideas pointing towards a different conception of causality, singularist and undetachable from explanatory practices.

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Manuel De Pinedo García
University of Granada

References found in this work

Intention.G. E. M. Anscombe - 1957 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Mental Events.Donald Davidson - 2001 - In Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 207-224.
Intention.Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe - 1957 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.Donald Davidson - 1973 - Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47:5-20.
On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.Donald Davidson - 2011 - In Robert B. Talisse & Scott F. Aikin, The Pragmatism Reader: From Peirce Through the Present. Princeton University Press. pp. 286-298.

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