behavioristic reduction of the mental, based on definitions of mental con- cepts in terms of physical/behavioral concepts, is out of the question, Davidson regards the irreducibility of the mental as established. It is clear, then, that anomalous monism is a form of nonreductive physicalism – it is physicalism because it claims that all mental events are physical events, and it is nonreductive in that it considers mental properties to be physically irreducible. It is also a form of “token” physicalism: each individual event, or “token event,” is a physical event. And it excludes type physicalism, the claim that mental properties and kinds are physical properties and kinds. But anomalous monism differs importantly from another influential form of nonreductive physicalism, due to Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, and oth- ers, which is based on the functionalist approach to mentality. According to this form of functionalism, mental kinds, though irreducible to physical/ biological kinds, are physically “realized” or “implemented.” Moreover, a single mental kind – say, pain – can, and usually does, have diverse physical realizers in different biological species and structures (this phenomenon of “multiple realization” is what is supposed to preclude the identification of mental properties with physical properties). This means that, on this view, there are type-type connections between the mental and the physi- cal, although not of the kind that would sanction reduction or reductive identification. If pain is realized by C-fiber stimulation in human beings (as it is said), by X-fiber stimulation in octopi, and by Z-fiber stimulation in Martians, then each of these realizers constitutes a nomologically sufficient condition for pain. That is, there will be laws such as ‘If C-fiber stimulation occurs in a human being at t, pain occurs to that human being at t’, ‘If
X-fiber stimulation occurs in an octopus at t, pain occurs to it at t’, and
so on. What would enable reduction, but what according to these func- tionalists we cannot have, are “bridge laws” of the biconditional form, for example, ‘C-fiber stimulation occurs in x at t if and only if pain occurs to x at t’. Of course, Davidson’s anomalism is not supposed to extend to sensory events such as pains, but the example could easily be couched in terms of belief, desire, or some other intentional state. Davidson’s anomalism of the mental disallows even one-way laws like those connecting mental states to their physical realizers.
3. ANOMALOUS MONISM AS A THEORY OF MIND
Anomalous monism was welcome news to many philosophers who had a deep commitment to a physicalist world view but who, like Davidson, were
Philosophy ofMind and Psychology 125
reluctant to embrace reductionism or eliminativism. In its assertion that all individual mental events are physical events, it attempts to preserve physicalism, and at the same time it promises to protect the autonomy of the mind with its rejection of the physical reducibility of the mental. The mental autonomy that Davidson wants is not the kind of autonomy that philosophers like Jerry Fodor have sought for psychology and other special sciences (Fodor 1974). Rather, it is the autonomy of agency and the will, of the kind that Kant famously sought. In the closing paragraph of “Mental Events,” Davidson writes:
We explain a man’s free actions, for example, by appeal to his desires, habits, knowledge and perceptions. Such accounts of intentional behavior oper- ate in a conceptual framework removed from the direct reach of physical law by describing both cause and effect, reason and action, as aspects of a portrait of a human agent. The anomalism of the mental is thus a neces- sary condition for viewing action as autonomous. (Davidson 1980c [1970], p. 224)
Davidson concludes the paper with a quotation from Kant in which Kant describes the philosophical problem of reconciling the two seemingly con- tradictory views that we hold about ourselves – first, that we are free and autonomous agents, and second, that we are part of the natural world and subject to its laws. Anomalous monism is Davidson’s response to the Kantian challenge. It is not simply a technical thesis about the irreducibility of psy- chology as a special science; it has a deeper philosophical aim, namely, that of providing a solution to the metaphysical and moral conundrum arising out of our dual nature as agents and natural objects.
All this makes it evident that the anomalism of the mental is the center- piece of Davidson’s philosophy of mind; his entire picture of mentality, its relation to the world of matter and cause, and our status as free agents flow out of it. Mental phenomena, qua mental phenomena (or under mental de- scriptions), do not come under predictive/explanatory laws of the kind that we have come to know from the physical sciences. Mental events do enter into causal relations, on Davidson’s view, but here too the laws that ground these causal relations are physical laws, laws connecting physical kinds to physical kinds. Unsurprisingly, the anomalous character of the mental, es- pecially given Davidson’s commitment to the nomologicality of causality, has been a focus of debate over the adequacy of anomalous monism as a theory of mind.
Consider, first, the question exactly what anomalous monism says about the mind-body relation. What do the three premises and the conclusion of