[In the philosophy of mind] it would seem no historical accident that the abolishment of teleology was followed by a Descartes. That intentionality is the very mark of the mental, was the thesis of Brentano. This were to become the central doctrine of Husserl’s phenomenology, which was supported by Sartre, as he concurred that “It is of the very nature of consciousness to be intentional” (Crane, 1998, p. 1).
(This chapter was part of my master thesis, republished here for the purpose of my upcoming blog post, but it can also be read by itself.)
John Searle himself admits that: “intentional notions are inherently normative. They set standards of truth, rationality, consistency, etc., and there is no way that these standards can be intrinsic to a system consisting entirely of brute, blind, nonintentional causal relations” (1992, p. 51).
With a natural philosophy left with merely efficient causality, intentionality quickly became alien to the new mechanist order. To safeguard the integrity and freedom for consciousness in the new mathematized model of the world, devoid of inherent intentionality, Descartes postulated mind as a new substance, through his substance dualism. Since then, the debates have still been running high among philosophers to find a suitable place for the mental in a mechanist, physical world, preferably without locating it on the outside.
The danger is not only having to locate mentality beyond the physical order, which gives rise to all sorts of philosophical conundrums, such as the interaction problem. But starting from a mechanist point of view, at another extreme looms eliminativism. This threatens to collapse a description of mind into a description of the brain and denies the causal efficiency of mental events. The result would be some form of epiphenomenalism, where our minds are resigned to the role of spectators, observing the unfolding of our histories, but unable to affect it in any real sense. If this is true, we are back in the Greek tragedy, as helpless tools for the gods.
Epiphenomenalism is not a very attractive view. Attractivity is one thing. Truth might often be unattractive. Even worse, is that the view threatens the very integrity of reason itself. Since reasoning is an activity that we ascribe to the mental faculties of a person, if these are not causally intertwined with reality in some sense, we have reasons to doubt whatever our reason might tell us, including the reasons that informs us that we should doubt the findings of our reason. A thoroughgoing Pyrrhonian skepticism might be unescapable.
Donald Davidson saw this danger to present probably what can be regarded as one of the strongest arguments to save the integrity of mental causation within a materialist, mechanist worldview, with what he calls anomalous monism. His paper, Mental Events (1970), played a big role in a decline in mental reductionism. Here, he argues against a form of type-type mind-brain identity theory, and thereby seemingly avoids the epiphenomenal danger posed above.
Davidson starts with the common observation that at least some mental events interact with physical events. According to Davidson, any event that is causally linked to another, must fall under a strict lawlike connection of cause and effect.
However, he also notices that there is no such lawlike connection by which we can predict and explain mental phenomena, like we can with other objects that move in a lawlike fashion, such as projectiles. This is what he calls the principle of the anomalism of the mental. Therefore, if the mental and the physical are different things, there must exist certain psycho-physical laws that describes their interaction.
Therefore, Davidson thinks that a type-type identity is not possible, because such a theory would need to presuppose that at least in principle it would be possible to conjoin mental events to physical events in a lawlike fashion (Ibid). To borrow an example from Quine, we might observe a tribe and attempt to translate their language. We might notice that they utter “gavagai” in the presence of a rabbit, and wonder how these are connected, the observation and the linguistic content of the utterance, based on a set of metaphysical assumptions about the villagers.
Regardless of Quine’s interest of whether the villagers meant “gavagai” to mean something like “rabbit”, “part of rabbit” or “temporal stage of rabbit”, we must assume that the villagers really have a belief that there is a rabbit there, and that they intend to express this in linguistic fashion Quine. Davidson’s interest is in the fact that none of this would be a meaningful activity, if we did not attribute other people’s linguistic behavior, with a set of independent beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. In short, this interpretation demands that we ascribe to them rationality.
Of course, this interpretation is open to revision as we come to learn more about the person. The discovery that a person is in danger of losing his job, makes sense of why they sleep worse at night than before and spend money more scarcely. But this is still something qualitatively different from the vision of having a determinate understanding of the person’s thoughts and intentions, merely on a scientifically accessible understanding of his physiological makeup.
The point is that mind, language, and behavior is so interwoven that we cannot understand one without the other. It is impossible to understand what occurs in the mind of another without making such assumptions. We will never be able to read a person’s thoughts by investigating their physical constituents. This is strange, as it does not correspond with anything we know from the physical sciences. In other physical systems, mechanically understood, there is no need to attribute anything like belief, intentionality or norms of rationality to make sense of it (Feser, 2009; Davidson, 1970).
Hence, there is no one-to-one match between mental states and physical states within this framework, as this would imply that at least in theory we would be able to read off a person’s thoughts from an introspection of his brain (Kim, 2011). As Wilfrid Sellars propose, there is no hope of identifying the “space of reasons” with the “space of causes”, so that “in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says” (1956, p. 181).
We can conclude at this point, that there is much to be said about Davidson’s anomality of the mental. It is harder to make sense of the latter half of the equation – the monism. Davidson needs to insist that mental events are still physical events, only of a very different sort, this is not type-type but a type-token variant. Even if we insist on maintaining our monism, it seems that if Davidson is correct, at this point we need to give up the mechanist interpretation of its causal processes.
Still, a notable thinker like Jaegwon Kim argues that Davidson’s view will still lead to epiphenomenalism. In Kim’s discussion of anomalous monism, he proposes that to say that a mental event m is a cause of another event p, whether mental or physical, is tantamount to saying that “m has a physical property Q (or falls under a physical kind Q) such that an appropriate law connects Q (or events with property Q) with some physical property P of p” (2011, p. 207). This must be a physical law, he continues, as there exist no special kind of law connecting mental kinds to physical kinds. Then individual events can only have causal relation to the extent that they have physical properties that can be included in these lawlike descriptions.
The implication of this, is that any mental event must then be translated into a description in terms of physical properties in order to explain how they can stand in causal relations. The problem then, is that mental properties then turn into causal idlers, quite contrary to the intentions of Davidson.
Kim calls this a special kind of “mental properties epiphenomenalism”, since individual mental events are still allowed a role to cause other events. Mental properties, on the other hand, are causally irrelevant. My mental property of e.g., experiencing thirst, would play no role in my initiating a causal chain to help myself to a glass of water. Kim concludes that in Davidson’s theory, all mental properties might be removed from the universe, and it would look exactly the same. A world without mental properties, would be a world without much need for reasoning about bioethics. We are still left with the urgent question of how mental properties, our desires, thoughts and intentions, can be efficacious (Ibid).
References
Crane, T. (1998). Intentionality as the mark of the mental. In A. O’Hear (Ed.), Contemporary Issues in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Davidson, D. (1970). Mental Events. In L. Foster & J. W. Swanson (Eds.), Experience and Theory (p. 207-224). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Feser, E. (2009). Davidson’s anomalous monism. Retrieved from https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2009/05/davidsons-anomalous-monism.html
Kim, J. (2011). Philosophy of Mind, 3rd ed. Colorado: Westview Press.
Searle, J. (1992). The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sellars, W. (1956). Science, Perception, and Reality. London: Routledge.