Ep. 398: Donald Davidson on Mind vs. Body (Part One)
episode
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
52 min
3 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 16 hours ago
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What is the central question about reasons and actions that frames the episode?
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You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 398 is something like, Do our reasons cause our actions? And we read two papers by Donald Davidson, Actions, Reasons, and Causes from 1963, and Mental Events from 1970. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexamined life.com. This is Mark Lintemeyer picking up the nomological slack in
Madison, Wisconsin. This is Wes Allwan trying and failing to bring my thoughts under a governing law in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
And this is Christopher Heath with a pro attitude toward drinking paint in uh North Hollywood. Welcome back, Chris. Yeah. Good to be back, man. Thanks for there for having me. Yeah. Thanks for coming on. This is super interesting.
Chris is going to be here for the next one as well. We knew that Dylan was had just started a new job and is going to miss some episodes. Seth was still supposed to be here, but he just had a last-minute flight thing. So I guess he has suffered through these articles and does not get to share his insights.
Yikes. That's unfortunate.
So we've done a little Davidson before. We did on the very idea of a conceptual scheme, was the article we had done from him before, which relates to these because it's about the holistic nature of how we understand other people's minds. And in that article, he was concerned about truth and the fact that we when just to interpret another person, you have to assume that they're telling the truth. truth most of the time, right? If you didn't, you would not understand their words. You could never learn language unless people were, when they're pointing out your parents are pointing at a tree and saying, tree, if they were lying to you, then you would never learn language.
Yeah. Because we're interpreting each assertion. Against a b a bunch of background knowledge that is largely he doesn't say this, but based on Testimony. Yes. And if none of that were true, we would lose the capacity to genuinely interpret yeah, speech acts. None of this would have gotten
off the ground without all that. Yeah.
So strangely, that past essay that we did, which I had picked, is not part of his essays on actions and events, is sort of the big book that I owned from him. And these are two of the famous things in it, which Wes, you were saying before we should start with the chronologically second one, mental events.
Yeah, I just think it's easier to understand what he's on about. Did you not agree?
I do agree. So let's see if we can put them both in context. Just that, right? The mental events paper is about He actually starts it by just asking the Kantian question about can the mind both be determined in that, you know, it's a brain, we are brains, we are physical things, and we are in that net of causal determinism, but can it also be free? The modern sort of interpretation of that is not that, you know, we have a soul that is out there by itself outside of the causal order entirely. In fact, Davidson stresses that. In our everyday talk, mental things affect physical things. I saw a physical thing in the world. There was a physical thing that appeared in front of me, and it caused a sensation of this, which caused a contemplation, a decision.
And the decision moved my body and did some things. So it seems like it is in that causal network, but yet, so he's going to argue ultimately, yes, there's still various. reasons why the realm of the mental should be considered separate from the strict causal determinism of the physical. At the same time, you can still, you know, believe that without being a Cartesian dualist, you can think that mental events are brain events.
Yeah. He's gonna argue that mental events are identical to brain events, that you couldn't alter a mental event without altering the underlying brain state, you know, underneath it.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central question about reasons and actions that frames the episode?
0:00–7:33
2
How do Davidson’s “Mental Events” and “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” papers challenge the link between reasons and causal explanations?
7:33–14:44
3
What are Davidson’s three core principles (causal interaction, nomological character, anomalous monism) and how are they introduced?
14:44–20:21
4
How does the discussion illustrate the tension between mental‑physical token identity and the lack of strict laws for mental events?
20:21–27:00
5
Why does Davidson argue that mental events can be both causes of physical events and exempt from deterministic laws?
27:00–32:46
6
What role does Tarski’s undefinability theorem play in supporting Davidson’s view of mental‑physical supervenience?
32:46–39:23
7
How do the hosts use everyday examples (e.g., wanting coffee, slipping on a banana) to probe the plausibility of mental‑physical laws?
39:23–45:06
8
What conclusions do the hosts reach about the compatibility of Davidson’s three principles and the prospects for a unified mind‑body theory?
45:06–52:01
Speakers
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