thesis

The Problem of Mental Anomaly
The further objection in principle is outlined by Davidson in his well-known paper,
‘Mental Events’ (1970). Much of the piece is concerned with a form of the identity theory,
but we are interested here in the argument against the possibility of psychophysical laws.
Davidson says (89, 97–98):
Laws are linguistic; and so events can instantiate laws, and hence be explained or predicted in
the light of laws, only as those events are described in one or another way…
There are no strict psychophysical laws because of the disparate commitments of the mental
and physical schemes. It is a feature of physical reality that physical change can be explained
by laws that connect it with other changes and conditions physically described. It is a feature
of the mental that the attribution of mental phenomena must be responsible to the background
of reasons, beliefs and intentions of the individual. There cannot be tight connections between
the realms of each is to retain allegiance to its proper source of evidence… We must conclude, I
think, that nomological slack between the mental and the physical is essential as long as we
conceive of man as a rational animal.
Davidson is saying that the existence of laws connecting physical and mental events
would entail a redefinition of the mental in which we would no longer recognise ourselves,
since our concept of rational agency requires a certain degree of scientific anomaly. Clearly,
he has raised a number of complex issues, particularly regarding the nature of scientific laws
and what it means to say that an agent is rational. But much of Davidson’s argument also
comes from the assumption that the mental must supervene on the physical (88), implying
that a comprehensive set of psychophysical laws would have to explain the mental by the
physical. If, alternatively, there were laws linking independent mental and physical proper-
ties to some extent, the existence of “tight connections” would not exclude the possibility of
“nomological slack”. Much more could be said on this issue – for now, let us take David-
son’s article as further highlighting the difficulties any naturalist account of consciousness
would have to contend with.
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