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On “Mental Events” (1970) and “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” (1963), featuring Mark, Wes, and returning guest Chris Heath.
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Davidson was roughly in the “ordinary language” camp of analytic philosophy, but (like Kripke) thought that he could draw certain metaphysical conclusions from his analyses of what we mean when we talk about “mental events” and “reasons for acting.”
We often talk about people having (mental) reasons for engaging in (physical) acts, and that physical things (say, a sunrise) cause mental occurrences (my perceiving and thinking about the sunrise). Does this mean that mental events are part of the closed physical, mechanical system that science studies? Wouldn’t this imply that we don’t have free will?
Davidson, in “Mental Events,” argues that every mental event is identical to some particular brain event, such that you couldn’t change one without changing the other (so there are no “philosophical zombies,” i.e. beings with the same brain chemistry but no conscious mentality at all). Still, the mental and physical are different vocabularies with different logics to them. We can reasonably say that my desire to eat a cookie was a cause in my actually eating the cookie, but that’s not to say that there is some natural law by which, whenever a person has this desire and is in an appropriate circumstance and has no contravening desires, that the action will invariably take place. That’s simply not how we talk about mental causation.
Instead, when I have that desire (at a particular point in time), my brain is in a certain state corresponding to that desire, and that brain state (caused by prior mechanical things in and around the brain) does then cause nerve impulses which cause me to make the movements of eating. All the causation in that description are lawlike. So Davidson’s argument is is for “anomalous monism,” which means that mental and physical events are one and the same, yet on the mental side, the activities are not lawlike, i.e. they are anomalous (“nomology” having to do with law). This doesn’t mean that there are no general mental correlations, but the language game of assigning motives to people is different than the language where scientists explain strict causality.
As we get into in the last part of this episode, Davidson tries to use Gödel’s incompleteness theory to show that while the set of physical facts can be self-contained, i.e. every sentence in the set is provable using only the language of the set, if we add meta-language about the physical (e.g. “this physical fact IS TRUE,” where truth is not itself a physical property), then we no longer have a set where every statement can be proven. Though we’ve covered Gödel and his use by Tarski (about truth) before, none of us really understood this move, and I’m not sure if I’ve even stated it correctly here. So help us out in the comments!
Read the essays here and here.
Listen to our previous episode on Davidson. For more context, check out the Stanford article. Here’s a playlist of conversations from the ’90s between Davidson and other philosophers like Richard Rorty, P.F. Strawson, and John McDowell.
Image by Charles Valsechi.
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