Ep. 398: Donald Davidson on Mind vs. Body (Part Two for Supporters)
episode
The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
53 min
3 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 14 hours ago
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What is Davidson's argument about the lack of law‑like character in mental events?
You're listening to Partially Examined Life, episode 398, part two. We've been talking about Donald Davinson's paper, Mental Events from 1970. We're going to move back to Actions, Reasons, and Causes from 1963. Presumably, I think we've gotten through a lot of the story of mental events. There's three sections to the paper, and we already talked about the first one where we're just establishing token-token. Identity between mental and physical events. And now we have moved into section two. We're talking about how there is no law-like character to mental talk, right? That mental events are anomalous, that they cannot be pulled into the causal nexus that is the closed system of physical events. That we think that, yeah, there's this physical web.
Of causality. And the question we've already said mental events are not completely separate from that in that I can there can be a physical thing in the world and I can see it, right? It gives rise to a mental event in me. I can decide to do something, and that produces a change in my and in the body. So a physical event. So it's somehow, but it's not part of that, you know, it's not going to be a strict causal laws in the way physical. events have.
Yeah. So the way he's gonna explain this next is in terms of what he calls the Failure of definitional behaviorism. And which will lead us into holism. So he thinks it fails in the way that other forms of reductionism fail, including phenomenalism and extreme naturalism. If you try to reduce in either direction. You run into problems. So for instance, if a man believes there's life on Mars and we try to reduce those mental concepts to some sort of behavior, like he assents, you know, he's produces this sort of language behavior. Well, we can't really say what it means to assent to something unless we see that assent as intentional, right? He might just be uttering the sound accidentally or something like that.
It could be in coincidence. We can't say a yes as the meaning that we say it has unless we can say something further about the intention. And we can do that, that that problem occurs, he says, ad infinitum. There are additional conditions for at each new step. We can never stop doing that.
Yeah, it's worth reading this quote. At the end, he sort of concludes this on page, I think, four and forty-three. Beliefs and desires issue in behavior only as modified and mediated by further beliefs and desires, attitudes and attendings without limit. Clearly, this holism of the mental realm is a clue both to the autonomy and to the anomalous character of the mental. Yep. Which sort of sums that up. And then we're gonna go
into some Nelson Goodman that we long ago talked on this podcast about grew and bleen. So, you know, there's blue and green. We know what those are, but why can't I uh and it seems like if you know you could use you could generalize if you see one emerald is green and you all the other emeralds you see are green, well you can say they're all green. What can you Can you do something with a concept like Well, say what Gru is. I don't think you said what Gru is. Yeah. So Gru is blue before time T, which is whatever time you decide, and green after that. So if you're looking right now, and you know, so now is time T and it's an emerald. Yeah, can you say that you're seeing a green emerald? Can you say that you're also seeing a Gru Emerald?
Am I giving Example, right?
Yeah, so it's blue before I think time T, right? And or green before time T and then blue after that, right?
All the emeralds are green. Yeah, but yeah. There you go. There you go. So you would say
after 2030 they're blue. It's grew. Yeah. So it seems like it might be true to say it's grew, although we don't know yet, right? We we haven't if we haven't crossed time t. But there's no reason to induce, right? Knowing what we know about emeralds, there's no reason to believe that after some given time they're gonna turn blue. There's no reason to believe that they're grew. And so I think the upshot of this is that he says that some predicates are basically unsuited to their objects, right?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Davidson's argument about the lack of law‑like character in mental events?
0:07–6:38
2
How does Davidson use the failure of definitional behaviorism to support mental holism?
6:38–14:39
3
What does the Nelson Goodman example illustrate about mental vs. physical predicates?
14:39–21:07
4
How does Davidson distinguish homonomic and heteronomic generalizations between mental and physical domains?
21:07–26:37
5
What role do reasons and justification play in explaining actions according to Davidson?
26:37–33:12
6
How does Davidson address practical syllogisms and the connection between reasons and actions?
33:12–38:46
7
What is Davidson's view on mental causation and its relationship to physical causation?
38:46–45:27
8
What conclusions do the hosts draw about free will, agency, and the usefulness of Davidson's framework?
45:27–53:43
Speakers
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